0 Disabled groups demand easy access to temples

Kadek Karya Dewi, a 33-year-old disabled woman, fondly remembers her childhood when her parents carried her on their backs to the grand, towering Besakih mother temple in Karangasem to pray. As she grew up and became a teenager, she was too weak to walk to the temple’s higher areas and was too shy to ask for help from her parents. The multi-level temple with its many stairs and sometimes narrow space between its split gates makes it impossible for a disabled individual like Dewi to worship. 

In the predominantly Hindu island of Bali, pura, or temples, are designed as open-air places of worship within enclosed walls, with the inner areas and compounds connected by a series of intricately decorated gates and stairs. These walled compounds contain several shrines, meru (towers) and bale (pavilions). The design, plan and layout of the pura follow the trimandala concept of Balinese space allocation. “The architectural styles and designs of pura have long been, fixed but we are really hoping to have other access to the temples,” Dewi stated. 

Dewi has suffered from permanent paralytic polio since she was 7 years old. She uses a wheelchair in her daily activities. Dewi and her family live in a village adjacent to Besakih temple, the most sacred place of worship for Balinese Hindus and, therefore, they, as well as other families in the neighborhood, are obliged to participate in a variety of communal works, locally called ngayah, when the temple holds its religious rituals. For those who have some form of physical difficulty, however, a curb or a few stairs can be large barriers. 

I Nyoman Dana, founder of Bunga Jepun Bali Foundation, a nonprofit foundation focusing on helping people with disabilities, claimed that praying and performing ngayah communal works in temples were the dreams of all Balinese Hindus, including those with physical disabilities. “It does not require massive renovation of a temple to give easier access. We can provide a new entrance for them,” Dana explained. He recalled his experience when managing a Hindu temple in Yogyakarta. 

“Sometime in 1995, we received a group of disabled people from Bali. Despite their physical handicaps, they were trying, hand-in-hand, to enter the temple to pray there. It was such a touching sight,” Dana said. This experience motivated him to start campaigns to create a disabled-friendly society in Yogyakarta, Bali and elsewhere in the country. He also worked hard to encourage the government and legal institutions to require all public facilities to be accessible to disabled people. 

“One day, a man with no hands was trying so hard to clean up the temple’s weeds using his mouth,” he remembered. “The majority of people here in Bali, and other places in Indonesia, have limited understanding of the need to provide access for the disabled,” he said. He continued saying that any physical feature that people without a physical disability took for granted could present serious problems for people with different abilities, mostly because their needs had not been considered when designing those features. 

“That lack of consideration can also be extended to the ways people with disabilities can be treated when they seek employment, education or services.” In over 50 countries, this situation has been recognized and addressed, at least to some extent, by laws that protect people with disabilities from discrimination and guarantee them at least some degree of access to public facilities, employment, services, education, and/or amenities, as stated in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). 

“People with disabilities are expected to be legally protected under a proposed bylaw on disabilities, currently being discussed at the Bali Legislative Council,” he said. Data from the province’s social affairs office stated there are 25,329 people with various physical disabilities in Bali.

source : bali daily