Barbadians have been urged to try their best to “make life better for people with disabilities” (PWDs).
Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs, Kirk Humphrey, made this appeal on Wednesday as he addressed the graduation ceremony for 30 students from special units who successfully passed the Barbados Secondary Schools Entrance Examination 2024.
Mr. Humphrey encouraged them to work hard, stating: “If you work very hard and you submit yourself to the will of God, and you listen to your parents, I believe you can go on to achieve anything in this country. It is my job to make sure that the barriers that we have are removed so that the greatness that is inside of you can come to the fore.”
Speaking to parents and other adults gathered, the Minister noted: “The disability that is biggest in this country is not a disability you have. The disability that is biggest in this country are the ones that are built into our systems and our institutions that prevent you from being your better self. And these are the things that we have to address.”
While acknowledging that the country was on the right track to making life better for PWDs and bringing about the necessary change, he expressed the hope that over the next few years changes suitable to this grouping would be achieved in education, health care, transportation, and other sectors.
Pointing out that he had come to the realisation that “all of us have a disability”, he noted his own shortcoming of hating to read when he was younger and called upon by his teacher at The St. Michael School.
“I believe that every person in the world is walking wounded, walking with something; people are carrying something. There is a hurt that every single person is carrying. You don’t know who you meet whatever they are dealing with on the day that they are dealing with the hurt. Everybody is dealing with something and if I could offer any advice to the world, it would be that we all could just benefit from being a little bit nicer to everyone,” he stated.
Mr. Humphrey lamented that when the Ministry was working on the policy for PWD, there were over 60 meetings and during these, people were “very unkind to children with disabilities and their parents”.
“We had employers who couldn’t comprehend that if you had a child with a disability, you might need a little bit more time. You got to give that person a little bit more time maybe to come in late, maybe to leave early. ‘What kind of world we [are] living in?’
“You have to give, in some cases, parents, a little bit more time. We have to find a way to be flexible to allow that to happen; we really have to do that work,” he stated.