Last week I got an email from my cell leader Matthew, forwarded from Pastor Mal, telling about this disabled lady named Carol Rasiah, who's interested in coming to visit CBC and he asked for some volunteers to pick her up from her place on Sunday to bring her to service. He attached the photo above of her in the email (yeah, apparently she and Hannah Yeoh are quite buddy buddy. Hannah Yeoh even made some space on her blog for Carol), and I recognized her coz' while I was visiting another church a couple of months ago, she was sitting pretty close to her in the service. I didn't talk to her at the time, so I doubt she would have remembered me, but considering she's wheelchair-bound and exceptionally small in size (due to some form of stunted growth disorder, I suppose), I didn't have the same problem of remembering her. And considering she's staying at USJ 1, which is really close to where I stay, I decided to go ahead and offer to pick her up.
So Pastor Mal passed me her phone number, I gave her a call to work out the whole plan of getting the little lady to church. She told me that I would have to go up to her flat to get her, and also I would need to carry her around a bit, so she strongly suggested that I get help from someone else. Considering I'd seen her before and she doesn't look all that heavy, I was thinking I probably could handle it on my own. But soon I decided since it's my first time with her and I don't spend a great deal of time lifting around disabled people, I decided to rope in some male muscle in the form of Damien Loo to help me, just he lives pretty close to USJ 1 too. I thought bringing a visitor would be a good way to get myself to church early too, coz I usually get to church close to 10am, when it starts at 9.30am (in fact, prayer starts at 9.00am, so technically I'm an hour late. Verrrrryyy bad! :S ).
So on Sunday, the two of us met up in USJ 1, spent a few minutes driving around the flats there until I figured out where Carol's flat was, went up to the 11th floor, and we spent another couple of minutes walking around there til we found her place. We found the grill door unlocked and she was waiting for us in her living room on her motorized wheelchair. She explained that she usually gets around her house and flat in that wheelchair, but whenever anyone takes her out, she has to go on a foldable wheelchair as that's the only one that can fit into a car. So Damien utilized that man muscle of his to transfer Carol to the foldable wheelchair, which was pretty funny coz' both of us have never handled wheelchair-bound people before, so we were both asking Carol what was the best way to do it. She was just amazingly understanding and friendly to these two blurcases whom she just met and who were trying to figure out the best way to move her around. Of course, eventually we got her into the wheelchair, down the lift and into Damien's car and off we went to church. Unfortunately my plan to be early to church failed miserably as after having to hunt for her place and move her around, we ended up getting to church around 10am anyway. Bleh. Of course, we gave her the best seat in the house by pushing her all the way up front, before I went to plop myself down at the usual side of church. I was quite amused during the announcements when they introduced the visitors for the day. Usually the visitors stand up for everyone to see, but obviously Carol couldn't stand when her name was announched, so I guess everyone was wondering where the heck this new person was.
After church, Damien and I took her out to Medan (which is now called Rock Cafe, for the uninformed. But seriously, who is going to call it that??) for lunch with some others church friends, where when she introduced herself as Carol to our friends, I got the chance to interject with the all time lame joke, "I'm Carol too, by the way. ^_^". We sent her back to her flat after that and the second time there, I guess it was because I was in less of a rush, but I began to notice that the flat area was in quite a sorry state. The walls at the lift area at the ground floor are covered with old posters and ads, and there are scratches, marks and graffiti all over the place. On the way up in the lift, Damien and I were wondering if there was any ventilation in there, coz it didn't feel like there was much air, though I guess there must have been coz' when we went up the lift was full of people and if there was no ventilation, I think we would have suffered severe breathing difficulties. Fortunately, we didn't. Still, later on after dropping Carol off, we both agreed that the condition of the flat was pretty bad. According to Carol, the lift even broke down once for 3 whole days, so she was stuck in her flat unable to go down to buy food from the shops during that time. Good grief. Fortunately, Hannah Yeah helped to do something about that. Go, Hannah Yeoh!
Another thing that got to me was when we were waiting for the lift, there was a lot of other people there waiting too... and all of them were just staring at Carol. The lift took at least 5 to 10 minutes just come down, and all that time, most of them just stared and stared at her, until I was rather annoyed with them and had the urge to say "Yo people, this ain't a freakshow!". I doubt they would've understood that anyway since most of them looked like foreign workers with probably very lousy English... but then I realised that while all the staring made me uncomfortable, the other Carol must be used to it coz' she probably would have had to put up with people staring at her all her life. Or maybe even worse things like people avoiding her or touching her coz' she looks so different... or kids getting frightened and running away.
Yet even with her disability and her sorry-looking flat and the stares from people, Carol was nothing but friendly and happy the whole time I was with her. And she told us that she even used to go to this centre for disabled people to help them out. Which really boggles the mind, coz' I find it hard to imagine that someone like her who has to rely on others to move around and can't do much physically can still help others like her. I suppose that makes her special in more ways than one.
Damien actually said that he learned a lot about working with people with disabilities that day, just helping to bring Carol around. I think I would have to agree, it's pretty interesting.
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