Extensions planned

Press, 22 May 1978, Page 13

Extensions planned

The Crippled Children Society not only finances many people to work to rehabilitate the disabled; it provides training facilities, workshops, pre-school training centres, short-stay hostels, family homes, accommodation for young adults, transport, and other financial help in many forms.

Because it expects an ever-increasing work-load, partly from rising road accident and injury rates, the Canterbury and West Coast branch is planning ahead.

Work will begin in August or September this year on extensions to the centre and the branch is negotiating the purchase of two home units in Darvel Street to accommodate six young people at a time. This will help them adjust from living at home to a life of independence—always the ultimate aim of the society.

An example of this adjustment is Richard Smaill, quadraplegic since a rugby accident when he was 16. He completed his schooling as a boarder at John McGlashan College, and now lives in a student flat in Dunedin while studying social and behavioural sciences at the University of Otago. He intends to do medicalsocial counselling and liaison work.

Richard, by sheer determination, has learnt to write. He also uses a typewriter, can handle normal table crockery and cutlery, and has developed other necessary manual skills.

Stewart Lyon runs a 20-hectare property near Milton, in South Otago. He took over the farm after

he broke his back and has developed skills enabling him to run the house and farm on his own. “Social conditions are often the main cause of a continuing disability. Once rejected, a disabled person will no longer want to develop skills and take part in the world at large,” says Paul Curry, central region recreation co-ordinator

with the Crippled Children Society. Confined to a wheelchair since he broke his back, Paul says: “I’m married, 1 work full-time in a demanding job and yet strangers too often want to treat me like a child—or worse still, like an object, -a body in a wheelchair without human needs and feelings.”