The Work Part

Well with my first week here ending I figure its time for another post! I have been getting a ton of questions about what we are actually doing on this placement so here’s an overview.

For those of you just tuning in, Silan and I are doing our placement at Helping Hands Center, a privately run school alternative for children with disabilities. As far as we can tell, in St Vincent they have two styles of public school, the average school system and the school for children with disabilities. The school for children with disabilities does not cater to wheelchair access or children with behavioural issues. The woman who organizes Helping Hands had a son with Cerebral Palsy and so when he could not attend a public school she set out to create a school for the children who fall through the cracks of the public system. Thus helping hands was born. The main diagnosis to arrive at \helping Hands is Cerebral Palsy and Autism (although autism appears to be the blanket diagnosis for most children with developmental delay here).

The average day at helping hands follows this schedule: 9am start, morning snack, daily devotion, circle time and then physical therapy, Lunch, nap or down time, afternoon activity(usually outside or a game if the weathers bad) and then the kids head home at 3. Songs and music are a huge part of the day here. It never ceases to amaze me how even in a child with no apparent reaction to any other communication or such restricted physical ability can show so much joy in hearing a song with their name in it.

Our first week on practicum we had a supervisor from Canada here with us (Nicole) so we had to really maximize our time with her expertise present.  Our role here is to basically pull kids out throughout the day and help them with anything we can. So far we have spent most of our time doing assessments looking at things like how kids wheel chairs are fitting them (or in lots of cases really not fitting them), how/what kids are eating/being fed, each child’s communication styles, and finally their ability to initiate and participate in play. We have spent hours brainstorming and getting creative in the evenings because there are a few extreme cases of cerebral palsy and autism and we definitely do not have the resources we would normally have in Canada to work with either of these populations.

We jammed as much work as possible into the last 5 days and I think we managed to use Nicole’s help as much as we possibly could have in that time frame . This week on Monday/Tuesday we will be doing a few home visits to children who have not been able to make it to school for the last little while to check in and see how they and their families are managing.  Wed-Friday is a holiday for the school so it will give Silan and I some much needed quiet time to see what kind of changes we can make to the wheel chairs and to plan some behavioural therapy sessions.This placement is definitely going to present some challenging moments but I am looking forward to having to think outside the box and trying to create treatments that the center will be able to maintain for the students.

For now we are stuck spending all eternity singing the center's favourite song over and over again throughout the day:

Hi Christine

I think I heard my name

Hi Christine

I think I heard it again

You are wanted on the telephone

And if it’s not Silan, then I’m not home

Hi Silan...

That is until the 330 cut off time for singing or humming this tune that we were forced to put into play to save our sanity.