BAPDA Needs Your Help with Projects
The Belize Assembly of Persons with Diverse Abilities called a press conference this afternoon at its office at the Samuel Haynes Compound in Belize City. During the press conference today, BAPDA President Kenrick Theus told the media that disabled persons in Belize are perhaps one of the most underserved sectors in this country; that the plight of the disabled in Belize is getting progressively worst. According to the organization, funding for projects is not there and so it is launching a campaign for assistance from corporate citizens and Belizeans in the diaspora.
Kenrick Theus
Kenrick Theus, BAPDA
“If you are able bodied and you have a job and you’re saying to me that you cannot afford to eat and can barely afford to buy ramen and the basic stuff that you would want to eat, you can imagine of a disabled person who has no work and who has to literally scrounge for everything that he or she wants to eat or drink. So literally we have people in Belize – and this is without exaggeration – we have disabled people in Belize that might not have eaten the last three or four days. We have people in Belize that are living in homes that are so rat infested that rat are eating at their foot. We have people in Belize where they are living in a house, disabled again, they are getting wet every time there is a rain or a sprinkle. So it’s enough to talk about this; we have to try to do more. And I am tired of the lip service that is being paid to it by all these different departments and stuff. And since we are tired of it and we can’t change it, we decide that we will try to get up and do more for them. The needs are not new – they’ve been there for a long time, almost forever – what is new now is that it is getting progressively worse. So we need to do something and I just want to list some of the areas that we are looking at that we need help. We have made contact with Mister Balderamos; he lives in Miami. He is prepared to send at least four wheelchairs a month for us along with adult diapers, but the shipping cost is the prohibitive part. Yu can pack a barrel for a hundred and seventy U.S. dollars to send, but how many diapers can you send in that. So it is not even cost effective to do that. So we need to get the money to send that down for the people. The wheelchairs, bandages – people are in need of bandages because it is expensive. To get your prosthesis; that person cannot afford to rent a car to go to Orange Walk or Corozal or wherever that is so we need to find a way to get a bus, a disability bus to take them and cover the cost and maybe even some food cause they don’t just have it. And that is the situation we are in now – we don’t have the money to do the things that we need to do. And that is real.”
According to Theus, BAPDA gets about twelve hundred dollars from the government, two hundred dollars from City Council and about three or four hundred dollars from Heritage Bank.
