 EARLY INTERVENTION This programme caters exclusively
to the child in the 0 to 6 age group identified through surveys
conducted by the community workers or referred from various
sources such as local clinics , other NGO’s etc. Services available
to the 3 plus child is a paediatric clinical programme
through which they can access therapy as diagnosed by the
paediatrician , special education in an enhanced and stimulating environment
and other opportunities for participation in drama therapy, social
outings, and a structured curriculum . The child below three years
is mostly on the home intervention programme with mental handicap
and focus here is to help the family to adjust and accept
the situation of having a child and counselling and guidance for the
mother . Children are also called for specific therapy sessions on fixed
days and particularly the infants.
‘Inclusion’ refers to the opportunity for persons with a disability to participate fully in all of the educational, employment consumer, recreational, community and domestic activities that typify everyday society. The road in quest for ordinary lives for persons with mental disabilities in particular has passed many milestone such as normalisation principle; the drive from charity to rights which led the UN Declaration of the Rights of Persons with mental handicap. Children with disabilities do need special teachers, special resources, special methodologies and sometime special environments. These so-called ‘special methods’ are often no more than good child-focused teaching practices, which would even otherwise benefit all children, including those without disabilities. The focus should be on finding ways of creating the condition that will accommodate pupil diversity and facilities the learning of all children. Keeping this in mind, Samadhan is endeavoring towards senditisation and involvement of local school inclusive education program. Mainstream schools run by Delhi Administration, Municipal Corporation and other private schools in the area of identified for placement in some of these schools. An awareness campaign was held through successful organisation of Sports Day by Samadhan staff with the involvement and cooperation of neighboring schools and the local community. The sport day was organised in the nearby park which was cleaned up by everybody. It was a good opportunity for all the children with and without disabilities to participate together Another examples of local community coming forward to support our children is that of a local shopkeeper’s initiative to train Rajesh Paliwal from the vocational unit to handle accounting, social skills and personality development. These example show that with Inclusive Education we can gradually phase out the segregated special school system. A step forward in this direction has already begun at Dakshinpuri Center through reverse inclusion where we have started within a small group mainly younger sibling, their friends or neighbors and some children from the Home Intervention program. Samadhan is aware that the steps it has decided to take towards Inclusive Education will mean a long had struggle. This programme offers educational , diagnostic and therapeutic services in a regular five day a week school environment. The children are between the ages of six and fourteen . The student teacher ratio is about 1:5. The teachers are trained in making their own individual education plan for each child under the guidance of the Special Educator and also make their own low cost educational aides usong locally available materials . Most of the children are referred from the the Early Intervention Unit and the Home Intervention Unit. After their time in the SpecialEducation Unit the children are referred to the Vocational Training Unit or sent to other NGO’s for specific training which we cannot offer in our Centre. Efforts are made to obtain
admission for these children in local mainstream schools . However
our experience is that even if we do get them into mainstream schools
they prefer to continue with us since the normal schools have
about 40 to 50 children in a classroom which preventd the teachers from
providing quality education and puts great obstacles in the way of our
mentally handicapped children since their special needs are never taken
into account. For the adolescent and adult person with mental handicap we subscribe to the philosophy of the ecology based curriculum. Simply put, this is teaching the the trade most relevant in a given target area. In DAKSHINPURI it is wood work and carpentary. So the children here were started on making simple educational aides in wood. This is called the MUPET (multi purpose educational tool ) and was designed by SAMADHAN in response to our need for good quality educational aides which are not as expensive as the toys and aides available in the open market which in any case is beyond the purchasing power of our low income families.
An exciting feature of our
curriculum is the introduction of DRAMA THERAPY into the classroom situation.
This has brought about some significant changes in the children. The
Western concept of Drama Therapy hasa been translated into our own Indian
cultural idiom. Creative drama , story dramatization and play are all
used for informal drama in which the dramatic theme is developed
with improvised dialogue and action with active participation of the
children. Our drama therapy efforts began as a programme called THE A.R.T.S which is an abbreviation for art, recreation , therapy and song and was a Saturday programme catering initially only to adolescent mentally handicapped persons who had no opportunities for meaningful recreation or leisure activities . This was streamlined into using the medium of the arts as specific therapy and particulary Drama with its components of music, rhythmn, movement , song and dance through interaction with the BRITISH INSTITUTE OF DRAMA THERAPISTS and through workshops conducted specifically for SAMADHAN by professional drama therapisats of this Institute . OUR COMMUNITY BASED PROGRAMMES THE COMMUNITY BASED REHABILITATION
programme was started in 1986 and initially called THE HELP THE HANDICAPPED
AT HOME PROJECT. The components of this programme are active involvement
of the parents of the mentally handicapped children in our Day
Care Centre and members of the community in DAKSHINPURI
as well as networking with other NGO’s in the same target area
so that collaborative programmes become possible.
Basic to our programme is the thrust on community involvement and informed and therefore willing participation. The members of the community who have over a period of time come to know us and our work are our best publicity . Along with word of mouth reports through happy and satisfied parents ,our well wishers from within the community become our potential workers who are empathetic and have the trime to spare to support us in various ways. The training is devised to suit those with home chores and other responsibilities . We include among our trainees , dais (mid wives ) from within the target community and workers from the ICDS Scheme ( Integrated Child Development Scheme ) which is a well known initiative of the government. The participants are therefore a mixed and heterogenous group and the training is done to suit the different demands made by this group. The Workers have reported the change in the community towards them since they are now seen as Agents of Change and report also a sense of increased self esteem. THE HOME INTERVENTION PROGRAMME Part of our CBR in the resttlement colonies is the Home Intervention Programme .We require partricipants to undergo a short training programme which has been designed specifically for those from low socio economic, deprived communities. The educational level of our workers ranges from middle school, to complete absence of a school education . Components of the training are a basic introduction to disability and to mental handicap in particular, its etiology, family and community issues with focus on benifits of community participation. They are taught the PORTAGE SYSTEM of service delivery which we have adapted to suit Indian conditions. An important aspect is the making use of locally available resources for the making of educational aides, using well understood and time tested methods for initial community contacts etc.The training programme lasts one week followed by an intense practicuum which is identifying client families through a structured questionnaire and later working with client families under the daily supervision of the psychologist and the Special Educator. A video has been made in
Hindi to demonstrate the one to one interaction of
the worker and the mother in the home environment of the
child . Community workers and Home Intervention workers both work
within the community dealing directly with the families of children
with disability and /or mental handicap with the difference
that a community worker may confine herself only to awareness and sensitisation
programmes while a Home Intervention Worker will work specifically
with families allotted to her by the multidisciplinary team of SAMADHAN.
An inherant part of CBR is the expansion of services using locally avilable manpower ,and materials avilable in most homes even in such low income communities and the collective wisdom of the community at large . In SANGAM VIHAR which is the neighbouring resettlemnt colony and within commutable disatnce of DAKSHINPURI such a SATELITE Unit has been started. During an initial survey people from this community expressed a need for a Clinic which would cater to the children and specially children with disabilities. Again, the need was felt because most of them could not afford to take time off to visit a Hospital or Clinic nor the wherewithal to purchase medication. Services started in SANGAM VIHAR are a survey conducted by the members of the community themselves to identify families with children in the 0 to 6 age group, motivating them to get their children seen by the team at SAMADHAN,s centre and therefater providing regular home intervention visits once a week under the supervision of the Special Educator. The SANGAM VIHAR SATRELLITE CENTRE is an example of our successful CBR. It has been set up wholly by one of the community women in DAKSHINPURI who trained with us and worked as a teacher before taking on this responsibiklity of starting a satellite Unit. She is now completely in charge of this Satellite Centre and organises the survey, the identification in the community of client families, the training module in collaboration with the professional team in DAKSHINPURI , our first Centre and finally the placement of home intervention workers in families requiring such help. Our future vision
is dictated by this success . We now envisage starting small
easily manageable satellite centres in low income areas through
trained community workers and through these centres exapnd our outreach
to include those who are still in need os special services .
The realisation that parents of children with mental handicap who attend our centre in DAKSHINPURI have a variety of skills, ideas and the energy and enthgusiasm to contribute within their capacities encouraged us to make efforts to utilise their latent skills . Starting as a small group meeting occassionally more as a social event than with specific programmes , the group has now blossomed into a full fledged Cooperative Society .SAMADHAN helped them to register themselves as a legal body under the name THE DAKSHINPURI PARIWAR SANSTHA ( The Dakshinpuri Parents Society ) The main objective of forming this society which was done in consultation with the group and since most of the members are women / mothers of the disabled, it was naturally the womens perspective which was important . The aim of the Cooperative Society is to :- empower the women , particularly those with disabled members in the family to achieve to a fair degree of self esteem and a better quality of life for themselves and their families. to enabl;e these families to attain a certain degree of economic independence by creating income generating activities suitable to their potentials and capacities. To add their superior skills to the production of the items made at the centre’s Vocational Training Unit so that we can achieve marketability of these items and improve both the speed of production and the quality . The Vocational Training Unit now has members of the Womens Cooperative helping in its production of papier mache items such as peacocks and parrots and decorative wall hangings etc. We have now recieved an order from the Cottage Industries which is a prestigious government of India enterprise and hopfully will be able to increase our sales once our items are displayed at the Cottage Industries outlets. Apart from helping out at the Vocational Training Unit the Womens Cooperative have started making a breakfast cereal called NASHTA whic translates in Hindi to “ breakfast “. This is an eaily made highly nutritious diet supplement with simple low cost ingredients such as groundnuts, lentils, and jaggery (unrefined sugar cane produce ). The inspiration for the NASHTA came about due to the great lack of nutrition among the pregnant and lactating women in the low income colonies and the consequent birth of low birth weight babies . The Nutrition Foundation of India which did the evaluation for us has specified that NASHTA has a high energy and protein content. In the low income colonies where SAMADHAN works NASHTA is the most suitable and affordable nutrition familes can use . THE WOMENS’S COOPERATIVE has now disciplined themselves into a group which has taken on the complete responsibility , both finacial and administrative , for the production of NASHTA. SAMADHAN will continue to support technically and in obtaining marketing outlets and product improvement for which we have approached some industrial companies . Our final goal is however to make the COOPERATIVE a self financing initiative such that the income will be available to its members, the women who are mothers of the mentally handicapped . This scheme has the potential of being replicated in other low income areas in Delhi initially and hopefully we cah share it with other NGO.s in other parts of India. |
This
Unit also makes papier mache items such as peacocks and parrots etc
and decorative wall hangings. These are all hand made. The tasks are
allotted to the children according to their abilities. However
to enable us to reach a stage where we can market these items we have
introduced a system whereby mothers from the Parent Group come and help
the children make the papier mache items ans well as the MUPETS. This
has made an improvement in the speed and quality of production .
