KUCHING: Government departments and agencies are encouraged to provide job opportunities to the visually- impaired.
“There are many things persons with disabilities or more specifically, the visually impaired persons, could do,” said Society of the Blind Malaysia (SBM) chairman Emmanuel Maoh Janting.
“There is no problem for them to be phone operators or general admin workers. Many normal people have the wrong perception that being visually-impaired means you can’t do anything useful. It’s like them closing both eyes and not able to do anything,” Emmanuel told reporters at the registration campaign for the disabled at SBM premises yesterday.
“Some people may even doubt our ability to work normally.
“Some of us are not even totally blind. Being visually-impaired doesn’t always mean total blindness. Some are just suffering from bad eyesight. It will not pose a problem to work as a phone operator.
“Given the right training and employment opportunities, we can contribute to the economy too,” said Emmanuel.
“There are many disabled people who are SPM graduates but because they were not given any employment opportunities here, they went to work in places like Kuala Lumpur instead.
“We hope the local government departments and agencies or even private companies will recognise our potential to work,” he said, adding that these departments and agencies could look to Social Welfare Department (JKM) and Sesco as examples that hire the visually-impaired.
Emmanuel stressed the importance of them having jobs.
“The public in general are kind to the disabled, but sometimes they can be too sympathetic to the entent that they forgot to let us be independent.
“Like the saying: give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That is what we aim for in the long run, for the right training and job opportunities so we can contribute to the economy and be independent,” he said.
There are currently 258 SBM members.
Ten are teaching, including Emmanuel at JKM, Customs and Semenggok Agricultural Research Centre. A few are working at Sesco, 70 as masseurs and the rest are unemployed.
On the registration campaign, Emmanuel is grateful to JKM for its effort in going to the ground to register the visually impaired.
“We hope such cooperation between SBM and JKM will continue in the future for the benefit of the disabled in general. With the government’s call for 1Malaysia, the disabled must not be left out of development,” he said.