Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Gargantuan institutions

Now I get it.

First, you raise millions of dollars from naive philanthropists and from your government. With those funds you erect a gargantuan institution situated miles away from any communities, the sort of entity that has been extinct for years in most other western societies because of the proven damage they inflict on their residents.

Then you take children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities away from everyone they love:their parents, their siblings, their grandparents knowing full well they will rarely manage to journey to their new remote abode.

You consistently refer to your institution as a "rehabilitation village" and boast about the 500 jobs this enterprise will provide for the neighboring workforce.

Then, having isolated these children from society, you import a few "normal" children from outside the "village" by hosting their kindergarten on your grounds, land donated, incidentally, by the government.

Finally, you invite a journalist from the county's pre-eminent daily to watch these children stroll past the disabled children on their way to kindergarten without staring or pointing. Honest, not even once. You mention a "joint project" between the normal and disabled children: voting for a name for the new kindergarten in their respective schools.

You assure the journalist that "soon" some "5-6" disabled children will actually be invited to join the normal children in their kindergarten for several hours a day. Honest, in the very same room.

"What a major achievement.you have just beheld." you gush to the journalist.

You congratulate yourself on a job well done: the donor cash can be expected to resume its vigorous flow in no time. It all makes perfect sense.

What still puzzles me, though, is why that bright journalist swallowed the slick PR performance lock, stock and barrel?


1 comment:

Haifa Diarist said...

There are many points of view to these problems.

I suggest you read my latest blog http://haifadiarist.blogspot.com/2010/06/drumming-heart-strings-part-2.html with a reaction of a mother who thinks rather differently.

By the way, I am not a journalist