Sofia Brizo spends four hours a day on what she calls "disability admin". The 27-year-old PhD student, who has cerebral palsy, said she needed to spend that time on making accommodations and planning alternatives, because "the world is not accessible".
Disability Wales said disabled people endured an "immense and often daunting" amount of administration.
*sighs* OK, I'll bite. Give us a 'for instance'.
Sofia, from Cardiff, who is also a disability activist (Ed: Funny how they always have time and enery for activism, isn't it?), said it was everyday things, such as planning a train journey or booking a routine medical appointment, which can take time. "It's all of these little things that kind of add on to your day and something that, for a non-disabled person would take like 30 seconds, for me sometimes it could take half an hour," she added.
She said she was lucky as her work in academia meant she had a degree of flexibility in her job, recalling how she recently had to leave a meeting unexpectedly to get her walker repaired at a nearby bike shop.
"I feel like my disability is a full-time job sometimes, and it's not just because of my own body and the extra care it needs, but it's mostly because of the inaccessible world that we live in," she said.
No, that's just more 'poor me' whinging. Be specific.
The para swimmer, from Bergamo in Italy, said she recently decided to monitor how much time she spent on these tasks, after a series of problems, and calculated it was four hours a day. "That's literally half of my working day and then I end up having to work weekends, but paradoxically, it's less stressful for me to do my job at weekends.
"I can't make phone calls about medical appointments on a Saturday or Sunday," she added. The campaigner said a recent attempt to book her smear test was a good example.
Newsflash, love - no-one can.
"I have a disability as it states in my medical record, I need my legs supported so I need a bed with stirrups.
"They say they'll call me back in a few days. A week later I call again, it takes about an hour, it's a different receptionist, I have to explain everything again."
Gosh, the non-disabled have never experienced that, I bet....
Eventually Sofia was able to book an appointment at a nearby medical centre, although when she arrived, they had booked the wrong appointment.
"The whole thing was a disaster," she said.
And none of that is down to 'accessibility' but down to incompetence on the part of the medical staff - something non-disabled people experience too, in even greater numbers!
The professor said, at times, asking for reasonable adjustments in the workplace could feel like asking for "special favours".
Are they things every other employee gets? No? Then what else are they?
"The embedded ableism that's in the way that we've designed everything, because it's people who are able-bodied, who have done the designing," she added.
Of course it is - there's more of us.
Perhaps Miss Brizo should speak to one of my favourite Christian preachers, Justin Peters. He has cerebral palsy and despite managing to fill his life to a level very few of us could emulate, I have never once heard him whine about his disability.
ReplyDeleteOh, and in my lexicon, activist actually means troublemaker.