Leisure centre for disabled receiving fewer donations

Since Razzett tal-Hbiberija opened 15 years ago, thousands of people with a disability have been benefiting from its rehabilitation services, improving their quality of life.

The fully accessible Park of Friendship in Marsascala, as it is also known, is a non-profit organisation providing educational, leisure and therapeutic services to disabled persons.

It was opened in February, 1989, by the late Paddy and Janatha Stubbs, its facilities offered free of charge to associations dedicated to helping people with disability.

The Stubbs eventually donated the park, which is now owned by a Maltese foundation.

The park, which is self-sufficient, spends about Lm250,000 a year to provide its services. It also gets a Lm5,000 grant a year from the non-governmental organisations unit.

Administrator Mark Sultana said yesterday that had it not been for the television charity programme l-Istrina in the past two years the park would have been in dire straits. The park does not get financial assistance from the government and, unlike a company, it could not reclaim value added tax.

So, for example, a bulb cost the park 18 per cent more than it cost a normal company. This was at a time when donations were going down, partly due to the fact that there were no tax refunds, making it cheaper for a company to sponsor a football team, for example, than to give a donation to a charitable institution.

However, the park did not use the money from l-Istrina for its day to day running but to invest in a multisensory project, which would, hopefully, be completed by the end of this year. In fact, it started financing the project through the Lm150,000 donated by l-Istrina in 2002.

The project will include three multisensory rooms to generate pleasurable sensory experiences in an atmosphere of trust and relaxation, stimulating the primary senses without the need for intellectual activity.

The park receives over 15,000 visits each year and last year it provided more than 1,000 disabled people with free services. More than 30,000 healthcare, leisure and education sessions were offered free of charge.

In this scholastic year, the park had 47 different schools using its facilities, 46 of which were state schools. These totalled 425 schoolchildren and transport was offered to 35 schools.

Unfortunately, 10 schools had to be left out of the park's programmes due to lack of money and resources.

Its disability services include leisure and educational programmes, hydrotherapy, physiotherapy, wheelchair dancing, fitness training and social activities and events.

The Park of Friendship, which has a full and part time staff complement of 35 and many volunteers, also intends to start auditing its accounts.

Guests visiting the park during an open day yesterday could witness all the programmes including cookery, horse riding, animal interaction and pottery.