“You must have confidence in yourself to earn respect from others,” a physically challenged woman who asked to be called Anna said at a forum on employees with disabilities in Taipei yesterday.
Anna has been crippled since she was a kid because of polio, but her disability has not kept her from leading a successful career at an international bank for the past 19 years.
“Of course I was worried about discrimination when I graduated from school and first entered the job market,” she said.
Anna said that when she was young, she was not allowed to attend kindergarten “because all the kindergartens thought it would be very difficult to take care of a crippled child and refused to take me.”
When she started elementary school, “all classmates looked at me as if I was a freak,” she said.
However, Anna said she soon impressed her classmates with her outstanding academic performance.
“A while later, my classmates began to want to be friends with me and study with me,” she said.
Fortunately, Anna said, she has not run into serious discrimination at work. Instead, her hard work has won praise from her employers.
“Physically challenged people may have some disabilities, but that wouldn’t prevent them from doing their job well,” said Jerry Fan (范可欽), head of an advertising company, and a handicapped person himself.
“If you hire a handicapped employee, he or she may then be able to feed his or her family, and a large part of our social welfare resources can be saved that way,” Fan said.
The life story of guest speaker Monthian Buntan was another inspiring example.
Buntan was born in a rural village in Thailand and has been blind since birth.
Despite his disability, Buntan earned a college degree in English in Thailand and a master’s degree in music in the US.
He moved on to become a leader in the campaign for rights for people with physical disabilities, and was also elected a member in the Upper House of the Thai parliament.
Buntan said he believed that the physically challenged need an equal footing, not sympathy.
“The charity-based society still exists in most countries in the world,” Buntan said in his address. “However, a charity-based society only views the handicapped as people with ‘problems,’ and tries to cure or help them based on sympathy.”
“In such a society, it’s not possible to have a total accessible environment for the physically challenged,” he said.
The handicapped, Buntan said, should be regarded as normal members of the public.
“‘Physically challenged’ doesn’t mean they’re incapable of doing things,” said Huang Cho-sung (黃琢嵩), executive director of the Eden Social Welfare Foundation.
“Businesses should provide them with employment opportunities, so that they, instead of becoming burdens on society, can contribute to it like everybody else,” Huang said.
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