Landsberg - People with disabilities often face insoluble problems.
For example, when a 14-year-old girl has to be diapered due to her disability, but there is no space in the supposedly handicapped-accessible toilets - except on the floor.
"But that is simply unhygienic and inhumane," says Meike Wunder and looks at her eleven-year-old daughter, who is lying on the floor of the public toilet for the disabled in the historic Landsberg town hall. Marie needs to be changed. But of course there is no space for the 1.50 meter tall girl on the foldable changing table. Therefore, Wunder does not want to be satisfied with the latest decision of the building committee on the subject of “toilets for people with disabilities”. And suggests alternatives.
Not only this mother knows the problem of the lack of nappy changing facilities for people with disabilities.
Stephanie Burghart's son Raphael is now too big for the changing table.
Excursions into the city, for example to eat ice cream, are therefore hardly possible.
Because if Raphael or Marie have to be swaddled, all that remains is the floor - either somewhere outdoors or in a public toilet.
For two years now, Burghart has been trying to create a “toilet for everyone” with a height-adjustable care bed.
She met open ears at Lebenshilfe Landsberg, among others.
Nina Klusmeier from Open Aid knows the problem and can contribute countless stories herself.
For example, from the 15-year-old, a short wheelchair user who had acute digestive problems in the city center.
The mother cleaned him standing up in "some corner in the back alley" and swaddled him.
She was “always afraid that someone would come by” and had no opportunity to wash her hands afterwards.
Too little space
The mother of a 13-year-old girl cared for by Lebenshilfe also reports how often she had to change her daughter “lying on the stone floor”.
She emphasizes how difficult it is when an extra person has to help but there is no space in the toilet.
There are also adult people who have to be diapered due to their disability.
With the "Toilet for Everyone", which Stephanie Burghart, Meike Wunder, Jonas Pioch and Barbara Juchem had applied for from the city, two birds would be killed with one stone: This toilet would also be available to people with disabilities who do not have to be swaddled . You also need a round-the-clock open toilet in the center of Landsberg. Because in a wheelchair or with a walking disability, but also for people with an intestinal disease, every meter is crucial in an acute emergency, says Stephanie Burghart.
This is confirmed by a mother whose son suffered a fractured femur and was temporarily dependent on a wheelchair.
When he needed a toilet in a hurry, she barely made it to an open toilet.
The sanitary facilities in the historic town hall are closed from 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. at the latest.
Now, not later
The solution proposed by the city council to implement a “toilet for everyone” in the course of the island pool renovation is useful, especially for the users of the island pool.
But this solution can only be realized in several years and that takes miracles and Burghart too long.
The two mothers emphasize that the “toilet for everyone” could soon be realized as a modular building with twelve square meters.
The cost of equipping the toilet is around 15,000 euros, plus the modular construction, which could be designed according to the surroundings.
Burghart and Wunder could imagine the building, for example, in the inner courtyard of the town hall extension, on the infantry square or on the meadow at the exit from the Lech underground car park.
Daniela Hollrotter
