Hazia’s Reflections

For 4 months since I started my new job, a familiar occurence greets me at the Masjid Jamek LRT interchange. I bump into them in the morning several times a week, a young woman and a child, perhaps mother and child, or caretaker and charge. He sits on a customised wheelchair with a cushion, he seems paraplegic rather than cripple. His size is like a normal 9 year old, probably he’s older.

What’s amazing is how the handicap-unfriendly facilities affects them, especially with the ‘renovation’. Since we travel in opposite directions, it took me several weeks to get the whole picture. The guard helps her lift him on the wheelchair down the 3 steps at Star LRT station. She then wheels him out to the Putra LRT station next door. That is nothing as compared to what she has to do next. She’ll get one or two passer-bys, normally young men, to assist her to carry him on his wheelchair - get this - 8 steps up a low staircase and then 45 steps down a steep staircase. At times she holds on to the left, another guy to the right and another guy at the back. However, sometimes, she has to manage with one guy helping only. There is no escalator or elevator to go down to the track, at all!

She must be really strong, physically and mentally, to have gone through this tedious series of tasks every single day. Not to mention, all this happens during the peak hours of the morning when the trains and stations are packed.