Taiwan seen from space is shaped like a sweet potato, and it has been well and truly baked in the past few weeks. The scorching heat brought by extreme weather is hard to bear and everyone has been saying the same thing: “I can’t stand this heat.”
There are among us many elderly people who live alone and their plight in this heat is even worse. Have government agencies thought about how to help these lonesome people handle the baking hot weather?
My wife is a greeting-call volunteer with the Huashan Social Welfare Foundation. Every day, she telephones elderly people who live alone to say hello and ask how they are doing.
There has been a rise in the complaints about the heat when she tells me about her day’s work.
The elderly people tell her the weather is unbearably hot.
Many of these people have no air-conditioner at home, and are not able to go out on their own and cool off in air-conditioned spaces such as shopping malls, supermarkets, public libraries and government offices. They frequently complain that they are “nearly dying in this heat.”
On hearing this, I asked my wife: “What is the foundation doing about it? Is it doing anything more to help?”
Her reply was that in special or urgent situations, she reports it to the foundation so that it can arrange a home visit.
What worries me is when temperatures suddenly rise, is there time to wait for lengthy administrative procedures? Could it be that by the time those procedures have been gone through, the person in question has already succumbed?
The Ministry of the Interior and other agencies should consider joining hands with non-governmental organizations to compile a registry of elderly people living alone who have no air-conditioning and might one day need urgent assistance. They could also set up a callback system that can facilitate immediate assistance.
Agencies could send a vehicle to take the elderly person somewhere that has air-conditioning, a service that daycare workers provide.
This assistance would help elderly people living alone to get through the challenge of extreme weather.
Tsai Jr-keng is a retired elementary-school principal.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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