KOTA KINABALU: Members of the ‘Pusat Amal Latihan dan Amali OKU Sabah’ sited in Tuaran are pleading for leniency from their clients on their failure to deliver orders.
Spokesperson for the establishment Azman Saidin said one of the centre’s income generating activities was furniture making for interested members of the public.
According to him, the response to the business had been good and this helped him to acquire more impaired people to train and subsequently help in making furniture for sale.
Recently, however, there were some glitch in the deliveries due to the floods that occurred in his area which effected his house and the furniture workshop at his home compound.
“It was a terrible time as we couldn’t save much of anything. As we are all impaired in someway, we couldn’t run around saving materials like normal people could do. My 92 year old father had to pitch in to do the clean up.”
“We were hit by floods three times. There was a lot of material lost,” he said adding that they lost many completed furniture too.
According to him, one of his clients had asked him to pay RM600 as compensation, and he had asked to pay in installment but the client refused.
Having acquired the money later, he then came to pay the amount but the person refused the money and told him that they wanted to settle it in the tribunal court to serve as a ‘lesson’ to him.
“This is not fair. Why do they have to drag us to court for that amount of money? This is causing us tremendous mental agony, so we have decided to stop the furniture making activities for the moment.”
“There are 21 less fortunate people registered with this centre presently but we cant work under such stress. These people are very sensitive and any emotional or mental pressure will effect them, rendering them unable to function,” he said.
Azman said they were trying pick up business again after the floods but it was quite challenging due to this development.
He expressed his hope that clients would be more understanding and lenient about their plight as they didn’t delay or stop completing the furniture ordered, on purpose.-pr/BN
