China 2013: Stone Forest Hospital Part 2

The last week of February I headed back up to Stone Forest to work with the kids and rehab staff there. The original plan was that I would evaluation, write goals for and begin training the staff on therapy techniques during my first visit and then just observe and tweak during my second visit. It turned out that they had new kids arrive so I ended up completing the initial steps of the process for the newcomers. The fact that they had new kids was great! It seems that sometimes it is initially hard to find kids with special needs and then once you get a couple, kids start coming out of nowhere. What was challenging is that two of the new kids had totally different needs (they are Deaf), than the kids that we already started with, so I was needing to train the staff on yet another form of therapy. I was really glad to have those two children though... being Deaf is tough especially in the rural areas because they generally don't have access to a school for the Deaf and do not end up going to school. These kids have high cognitive skills so I hate to see them sit at home all day and not have access to education or a social life. Because they aren't taught academic skills, when they are adults they have few vocational opportunities. Geting these kids relatively early (they are 5-6), is a blessing. With children who are Deaf here you have two options; sign language and literacy skills. Sign language is tough because they have Chinese sign language but it is hard to get teaching materials and really no one in the childs environment would be able to use it so it's actually not that helpful. Basically, we decided to encourage the family to continue to use the sign language that they had made up (the little girl points to her mouth when she is hungry etc) because it works and is understood by most people, but we also want to push reading and writing skills. When a person can read and write their whole world gets exponentially bigger. In Chn, cell phones are EVERYWHERE! Even people who are very poor seem to have them, this means that if we can teach these kiddoes to write, they can text, type, write characters etc to communicate. Chnse is acutally easier in this respect than English. Because it is a character based system, they can learn to match characters to words (whereas in English, letters represent sounds). Also, to some extent, characters resemble the word that they represents (for example, the character for "person" actually looks like a person). Also, teaching them to read and write makes them seem more capable to the community... everyone was soooo impressed when we taught these kids to read the couple of characters that we taught... it was really cool!!!

It was also nice to see the therapists beginning to really grasp some of the concepts that we have gone over. One tendency is for the therapist to grab a stack of flashcards and have the kid say the words on the flashcards. There are multiple issues wtih this approach when not thought out... one is that some of these kids have very delayed langauge and the flashcards were very random. One kid uses maybe 15 words and the words that they were practicing were exotic animals. I explained the concept that since everything that we teach will take a lot of effort, we want to start with functional language... he deosn't need to know how to say "starfish" when he is living in land locked Stone Forest when he doesn't use the word for "shoes" yet. By the end of the week I saw that they therapist was really grasping that idea and when one of the kids bought a toy into therapy she was sure to teach him the word for that toy which was great because he plays with that toy daily.

During this week, I also saw the parents of the kids start to hang out together. This was really neat to see becuase there are no parent support groups here. Many of these moms carry the heavy emotional weight of caring for their child on their own. There also tends to be a lot of blame placed on the mom for the childs disability (why the dad is never to blame I don't know... if its genetic its half his genes... obviously no one should be blamed but if there is blame lets at least make it gender neutral : ) ) Anyway, I think its huge for them to support each other and to give the kids the friendships of each other since they may not have the opportunity to play with other kids.

On Thursday of this week we went to a garden party.... sooo fun! People wore big floppy hats (someone let me borrow one) and we ate BBQ out in the garden. There was a big vat of chicken feet which was a favorite among everyone except me. I lucked out and since there was such a crowd around the chicken feet that no one noticed that I didnt' each one...I dont understand it, what are people even eating? There isn't any meat on a chicken foot.

Overall, it was a great week and I really enjoyed working with the kids, parents and staff!