Personal experience: toilets for disabled people do not work in Moscow

Novye Izvestia often devotes its materials to the living conditions that the state creates for the disabled. Alas, we have to admit that despite all the positive changes that have been taking place recently, they still remain difficult even in Moscow, not to mention the provinces.

Svetlana Zaitseva, a Moscow philologist, writes about the delicate problem of toilets for the disabled:

“My son is not lying down. We can walk on the sly by the handle. He is seven years old, but he does not know how to ask to use the toilet at all, and generally does not know how to ask or ask. He just whines, and I try to guess the reason. He is dressed cleanly and smartly, he is a handsome boy and is always very happy if we take him with us.

Sometimes, however, you have to take it with you forcibly, when there is no one to leave with. For example, when I take my daughter to class. While it was cold, we waited for her in the Festivalny shopping center in the game room on the third floor. He lay in balls, walked on a slide, rocked on a swing. At some point, I needed to take him to the toilet to change his diaper.

We left the site - slowly, quickly, he does not know how, and it is difficult to drag him - and went along a long corridor. The Festivalny shopping center is a new building and has a toilet for the disabled. We reached it, I pulled the handle - it was closed. We began to wait - we thought it was busy. By the silence outside the door and because a lot of time had passed, I realized that the toilet was simply closed. At the same time, there were no signs on it, so waiting, thinking about the reasons for the inaccessibility of the toilet and tugging the handle were included in the ritual of sending natural needs for the disabled in this shopping center.

Then I saw a woman in a blue uniform cleaning gown and asked to open the toilet for us. This pretty elderly Uzbek woman with a trolley on wheels, in which there were cleaning equipment, told me that if we need to go to this particular toilet, then we should ask the manager for the keys to it. When I asked where to find the manager, the woman went into such long and confused explanations, further complicated by the lack of knowledge of the Russian language, that I realized that if you start looking for the manager, the son will get dirty when walking and his skin on his butt will get wet. Therefore, I went to the women's restroom and there, reluctantly, in front of strangers, I washed his ass and changed his diaper. It was possible to do this only in the place where everyone washes their hands. I stood with my back to the women washing their hands, my cheeks were flushed, I was very embarrassed that because of me they were forced to see and smell our hygiene procedures. I wished I could do this in a secluded, specially adapted place. Very sorry.

I have accumulated a lot of such stories over the seven years of our travels around Moscow. The excruciating sense of shame is not dulled.

You are amazing people! Look at what permanent humiliation our city, in which disabled people are deprived of the opportunity to go to the toilet, dooms us. Yes, the city tolerates us, but only if we don't shit. And if we do this, the outraged public pokes us into the diapers of our children, as if we were not people, but shit animals.

Imagine for a moment how your life will change if there are no toilets in the city at all. Imagine that choosing which place to visit will be, first of all, figuring out whether they will let you pee and poop if you feel like it.

And that's how we live. We think about the toilet all the time. If I didn’t have a disabled child, I would have no idea about this type of discrimination. About the fact that for poser, pee and wash, I have to ask the blessing of the head of the shopping center. After all, the right to go to the toilet in the toilet has always seemed so natural to me that it did not require proof or special discussion.

Having humiliated us in this way, trampled on our dignity, equating us with animals, which are assigned special sites to shit, we are also charged with the fact that we dare to wash the priests of our children wherever we have to. Ok, friends! We live a priori without any dignity. Our children may be called names with vegetables, they may not be allowed into certain places, because they are unpleasant to look at, we cannot go to the toilet in the city. We have not and did not have any dignity. We are outcasts, we have no rights, and there is only one duty - not to interfere with healthy people, not to call their eyes, not to scream and not to stink. We even have no right to declare that we need toilets. Because the public aggregate Freken Bock will immediately come running and yell: "Fu, how culturally it is!"

And one more thing: you beasts, gentlemen, humiliate a child!! Are we animals? Are we humiliating our children?

Dignity. As a mother of special children, I ask you - what is it in general, does it exist, is it your dignity?

***

They write to me: "Yes, everyone has forgotten how there were no toilets in Moscow at all!" Dear friends - that's the whole trouble that they haven't forgotten. When we visited my mother, who was in the maternity hospital on Clara Zetkin Street, we ran for half an hour looking for a place to go to the toilet. My grandmother's belly tightened. As a result, she recovered in some nook, where she found a bucket, as it turned out from the correct green circle on her grandmother's bottom, already at home, with green oil paint. We all remember and have not forgotten anything. For example, what if you run behind the garages on the Tretyakovskaya metro station after a dog that has fallen off the leash, you will get bogged down in a swamp of excrement. And so on. And it is precisely this memory that prevents people from moving to a new level of attitude towards themselves, towards their city, towards the disabled. People are simply afraid of the good. Therefore, toilets for disabled people in shopping centers and clinics are closed. They are still perceived as a whim or excess, as a luxury, without which we have easily got along for many years. It is in this part that you can listen to the voice of the ideologists of the world proletariat and begin to squeeze the slave out of you drop by drop. Not to endure and not to run, figuratively speaking, for garages, but nevertheless to recognize the expediency of toilets in the city in general and the right to milking disabled people to a toilet in particular. I believe common sense will prevail and a bright sanitary and hygienic future will come. Amen..."

***

Public figure Lida Moniava adds to this post:

“This is exactly the situation that Kolya and I found ourselves in a shopping center on the Skhodnenskaya metro station. There are public toilets for men and women - open to everyone. And the disabled toilet is locked with a key. An ordinary person, to pee, opens the door, does his business and leaves in 2 minutes. In order to pee, people with disabilities must call the phone number indicated on the door, ask the security guard of the shopping center to come and open the toilet. You can't always get through by phone, and sometimes you don't have time to call, wait until they come and open it. As a result, even where there is a toilet for the disabled, I changed Kolya's diaper in front of everyone in the women's toilet, because some idiot decided to keep the wheelchair locked with a key. Toilets and disabled lifts must not be locked! The accessible environment must be truly accessible.

I got to the handle with a "toilet" theme. I don't understand why people consider it normal to open establishments (cafes, shops, shopping centers, clinics, etc.) with a toilet that they themselves can go to, but which is not accessible for a person in a wheelchair. This is not normal, it shouldn't be this way. If you think that your establishment should have a toilet, everyone should use this toilet, not just the “walkers”. “Wheelchair users” are the same people who need a toilet no less.

I'm sick and tired of the advice that "in every area you can find a wheelchair". Go to the subway to a shopping center, etc. Toilets for people with disabilities should be as accessible as toilets for everyone else. If you come to a museum, office, cafe, hospital, hairdresser - any place where a visitor's toilet is supposed to be - it is assumed that people with disabilities should also be able to visit this toilet. If "walking" visitors do not go to look for a toilet to the subway, why should disabled people, who are doubly difficult to move around, have to walk and wander around the area to find a toilet?

It is very foolish to spend so much energy and nerves on accessible toilets. But without toilets, there is no normal life. I will apply to the prosecutor's office and to the court in places where they refuse to make the environment accessible to people with disabilities..."