Sunday, October 19, 2014

NDNorth: Bringing Hope for Cerebral Palsy

One of the things we have learned here in Inner Mongolia is that there is a big need for therapists who know how to work with children with cerebral palsy (CP). CP is just as prevalent here as in other parts of the world, but the knowledge of how to care for children with this need is limited. Because of this, many of these children are abandoned and are found in orphanages, where the staff do what they can, but really don’t know how to best help.  One of our visions at New Day North is to help these staff help these children. To this end, we have brought up several therapists over the past year to help the orphanage staff learn better how to care for these special children. We have already written a couple of blog posts about this in the past



You have also seen some of the pictures of our first New Day North room in one of the orphanages where we have begun working with some of the younger children who have CP. It has been great to see how well the children are doing and to see how encouraged the staff have been to see some of the potential for their children with this special need.


Another exciting opportunity we have coming up is to set up a room in the same orphanage with some of their older children who have CP. We hope to be able to both give these children better care and to provide a model of what can be done for children who have these multiple needs. More to come on this in the next couple of weeks.

Finally, as we have been both seeking to help the orphanages care for these children and seeing more and more of them abandoned, we happened upon a special center for special needs children here in the city of Hohhot which, with the help of governmental subsidies, provides therapy for families with children who have cerebral palsy and have NOT abandoned them. As we met with this center, we realized what heroes these parents were and what incredibly important work these therapists were doing to help these families keep their children. We saw how well it fit our vision to help these therapists give these children the best care they could get to encourage the parents and enable these children to reach their potential and to not give up hope and drop their children off at orphanages.  To that end, we partnered with a local American therapist who brought in a team of therapists she had trained in Mongolia to help provide specialized training at this center for their therapists. After several days of sharing ideas together, they gifted us with some therapy equipment to take back to the orphanage to use in our New Day North room to help the children there.


Therapy equipment donations

Kristiana in her new "seat"
Thank you, Margie, Duda and Daugie for your contribution of skills and materials to the children of China.

---
This post was written by Wendy, NDN's special education teacher

No comments:

Post a Comment