We offer many good options for travelers with special needs enjoy the Mexican Caribbean. With the correct preparation, there is no reason to miss the beautiful Mexican Caribbean. We offer oxigen for rent, from portable cilinders to concentrators. For the people that prefer to move with all autonomy, Hospitality & fun offers its service of Scooters for rent, which will facilitate their stay in Cancun, Playa del Carmen and all along the Riviera Maya. Rent and sale of oxigen With the correct preparation, there is no reason to miss the beautiful Mexican Caribbean, available in Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Riviera Maya. We offer the possibility of renting a manual wheelchair, from the moment of your arrival `till you depart, so you will be able to enjoy your hotel and activities, available in: Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Riviera Maya. Amphibius Wheelchair, only in Mexico!! For aquatic activities offer the possibility of renting the amphibious weelchair that allows you to enjoy these activities fully and safely.
Electric Power chairs for rent! Powerchair rental, For people with mobility limitations specific or complex, we have electric wheelchairs, safe and easy to use. With easy to use control and long battery life. Beach wheelchair for rent! Enjoy a walk on the beautiful beaches of Cancun, Playa del Carmen and the Riviera Maya. The chairs are ideal for people with limited mobility and works all type of beachs.Imagine going down 40 steep, crowded metro station steps in a wheelchair. You grab both wheels, lean back, and make small jumps between narrow steps that could launch you into a fall at any moment. “You feel the adrenaline like you’re at Six Flags, I swear,” says Abraham Plaza. “You learn the techniques perfectly, and it’s hard, hard, hard, because there’s not a second chance on the street.” As a wheelchair user, Plaza’s independence is not the norm in Mexico. Most people with a physical disability are told they won’t be able to support themselves, so depend on family as a result.
When Plaza, who is 24, goes out with other wheelchair users, people on foot are still surprised to see them on their own. Mexico City’s haphazard, crumbling street infrastructure is the most obvious obstacle for wheelchair users here. Kerbs can drop off without a ramp, and most metro stations don’t have elevators. City-wide sinking has caused many pavements to degrade into a moonscape of holes and hills. It also doesn’t help that neighbourhoods have been bisected with Robert Moses-like zeal. The dividers in the middle of 10- or 12-lane roads are a special challenge for wheelchair users. “If you’re crossing a big avenue and there’s a kerb and the cars are passing, you have to get up on the first try,” Plaza says. “If you go back, a car will come by and take you away.” Plaza is one of 72 wheelchair users who work at the city’s Benito Juárez International Airport, checking tickets and giving directions. To qualify for the job, he completed a rigorous course run by an alliance of three Mexican non-profits – Grupo Altia, FHADI and Vida Independiente – who are trying to help wheelchair users overcome the physical and psychological challenges of living with a disability in Mexico City.
The alliance helps people such as Plaza, who was born with spina bifida, and those who were injured as adults. Plaza has been working at the airport for four months. It’s his first job out of college and he works six five-hour shifts a week. He can now say he’s “100% independent. I don’t depend on anyone to accompany me in the street or support me financially.” Entering the workforce was relatively easy for him, in part because he has one of the few jobs in Mexico City where using a wheelchair is the norm. The hardest part has been dealing with angry passengers who arrive too late to go through security. Almost every three days one of them hits a member of staff, Plaza says, but he is unscathed so far. Plaza’s colleague, Noé Sanchez – who commutes up to five hours a day for a five-hour shift – says wheelchair users tend to be more reliable workers because most employers won’t hire them. This reluctance may help to explain why Plaza and his co-workers are so refreshingly focused on customer service.
They smile, learn greetings in different languages, and seem excited to greet passengers. Aside from steady pay, the job also provides access to private insurance – which is crucial because Mexico’s “universal” public insurance is widely seen as inadequate. The insurance allows airport workers to treat injuries that people on foot are often oblivious to (a common injury is pressures sores, which can lead to fatal infections if left untreated). Plaza says he had the good fortune of growing up near two wheelchair users. One rarely left the house; the other was Saul Mendoza, a Paralympic gold medallist in wheelchair racing. Mendoza, who now works as a motivational speaker in Atlanta, told Plaza’s parents not to coddle their son. “If I fell in my wheelchair,” he recalls, “it was: ‘Get up on your own … We’re not always going to be here to help you.’” Plaza has gone on to be a model alumnus. A knee injury prevented him from qualifying for the 2016 Paralympics, so recently he has spent more time on “street workout” – think gymnastics bar routine coupled with bro culture’s optional shirts and electronic dance music.
As in breakdancing, teams are “crews” and competitions are “battles”. Plaza is the only street workout athlete in Mexico who uses a wheelchair. His start in the sport was serendipitous; he was working out in the park when a crew complimented his moves. Plaza didn’t know what they were talking about – he always does pushups with his legs suspended in the air, because he has to. Last year, Plaza won a street workout tournament in which all 32 of his fellow competitors arrived on foot. Competition videos show him extended horizontally on parallel bars, doing handstands and flipping backwards. Like a figure skater building up speed, he does pull-ups and dips in between moves. Any one of the moves would be impossible for most people; how he strings them together for two minutes is hard to comprehend. Plaza says his goal is to break the limits of “what a person with a disability is; to do things people can’t imagine”. He thinks it’s the best way to change how people see someone in a wheelchair.
Despite how hard it can be to get around Mexico City, every wheelchair user I talk to says the way people with disabilities are seen is a bigger problem than accessibility here. All of them describe a culture of pobrecito (“you poor thing”) in which wheelchair users are pitied, and assumed to be incapable of supporting themselves. As a result, many spend most of their lives in their parents’ homes, which can quickly become a prison. On the street, wheelchair users say they often receive unsolicited blessings – but they are also regularly shunned by those on two feet. The city is aware of the problem; a recent public safety announcement on the metro about Down’s Syndrome read: “The disability isn’t contagious, but discrimination is.” The stigmatisation also makes it hard to find work in the formal economy. Many wheelchair users say employers are shocked when they meet after talking on the phone. And these dead-end interviews drive many people with disabilities into the informal economy, where they sell food or knick-knacks to get by.
Mexican laws prohibiting employment discrimination have been almost impossible to enforce. Grupo Altia, FHADI and Vida Independiente provide Mexican wheelchair users with the skills needed to live independently in spite of this discrimination. Policy advocacy is a secondary concern; instead they teach wheelchair users to thrive in Mexico City as it exists today, buckled pavements and all. The intense focus on self-reliance comes in no small part from Santiago Velázquez Duarte, who was paralysed at 22 when an ambulance crashed while taking him to the emergency room. Before recovering, he experienced severe depression and saw how wheelchair users were discriminated against. Velázquez founded Vida Independiente in 2000 to share the lessons he learned about living on his own with a movement disability. His organisation now serves around 1,200 families a year. The alliance has helped 355 wheelchairs users start formal jobs, including more than 150 at Mexico City airport. Grupo Altia’s classes focus on movement, teaching participants to navigate a city that can be perilous for wheelchair users and pedestrians alike.
In 2013, 491 pedestrians (pdf) were killed in Mexico City, compared with 180 in New York and 65 in London. (The number of cars per capita doubled in the Mexican capital between 1980 and 2010, yet there was no on-road test to get a licence until this year.) But the risks are more extreme for people with a movement disability, which is why Altia’s movement classes appear brutal. Their training course has steps, a ramp built to an out-of-code angle, and curbs that are found in the middle of avenues. While I am talking to an Altia coordinator, a young girl mistimes a curb jump and falls over backwards – to which the coordinator simply says, “It’s OK. This response appears typical of Altia’s commitment to avoiding any sense of “pobrecito” in its training programmes. The course is where Plaza first learned to negotiate subway steps – and his jumps now look as nimble as a ballerina en pointe. He learned a more brute force approach for going up the steps, however – grabbing the railing with one hand to stay balanced, then pushing himself up step by step with his free arm.