Hola!
Today started bright an early with both teams on a guaga and heading to their service sites by 730 in the morning. One group headed to CONANI, an orphanage for children with physical disabilities, and the rest of us - Ann, Katie G., Ali, Hannah, and Sue - headed to ICC or International Child Care center.
ICC has done some fantastic things for the Dominican community. The center began in 1988 as a NGO that is now run completely by Dominicans. Please visit this link to learn more about the history of this global organization. http://internationalchildcare.org/about
The center does many things for the community, including training promotodores, aka community health workers, providing direct care to children, or niños, with various disabilities, and educating families and children about preventative and sexual health. As a testament to their success, ICC now has 350 children on file whom they follow, and have expanded their clinic visits to more than 40 communities. These numbers are HUGE - muy importante - for the Dominican children because having a child with a disability is a social disgrace, and many children are simply left on the side of the road or on the steps of a church shortly after their disability is discovered. The fact that ICC is helping so many children with disabilities illustrates how much they have helped this community change.
Our role as estudiantes de terapista fisica, or physical therapy students, is to assess and provide a new insight into the therapy of these children. Today, we began our journey with ICC by traveling to a community where parents brought their children to the community center, which is simply an open pavilion on the side of the road. We spent the morning taking histories from the parents and utilizing play therapy to assess and treat los ninos. Although we were providing a novel insight into the conditions and prognoses of these children, it was hard as Americans to feel and believe we were providing care. We saw 3 ninos today, and will not likely see them again during our two weeks in the DR, and they will not be seen by other physical therapists for another year. In a nutshell, this was the child´s and family´s one shot for the year to get their home program updated and to get hope for their child´s future. Talk about pressure. In addition, the parent´s goals were largely unrealistic, and the language prevented us from truly communicating things like prognosis, and we could not provide the same education we could provide for an English-speaking family. We were very fortunate to have Sue Klappa with us to gather histories from the families.
Despite the barriers, the silver lining is that we, the students, DID manage to communicate with los niños and their parents on a very rudamentary level. Spanish is coming back to us quickly after all those years in the classroom, and we´re so thankful for this opportunity to improve in another language, and hopefully make communication with future patients in America more effective.
Hasta Luego - Until tomorrow!
Ali and Ann
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