ONCE Foundation offers to welcome blind, disabled Ukrainian refugees

Madrid, Mar 9 (EFE).- A Spanish foundation that provides services for the blind and people with serious visual impairment has offered to help relocate Ukrainian refugees who suffer from visual impairments and other disabilities, the organization told Efe on Wednesday.

The National Organization of the Spanish Blind (ONCE, in Spanish) issued a statement on the situation in Ukraine, expressing its “best disposition and availability” to collaborate with Spanish authorities and associations to receive disabled refugees and their families.

There are some 100,000 Ukrainian refugees who suffer from serious visual impairment and 2.7 million more with other disabilities.

The foundation will make all of its infrastructures available, as well as the Ilunium hotel chain, to help them integrate once they have arrived in Spain, sources from the organization told Efe.

It will also provide material and humanitarian funding, for which it is already working with NGOs for blind people around the world.

In Spain, the collection of walking canes, Perkins machines — Braille system typewriting machines — and educational material for blind children, as well as specific items for people with disabilities such as wheelchairs, has already begun. EFE

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