Wednesday

Today was a wonderful day – very productive and I had put enough information together to last the entire day without worrying about coming up too short like yesterday. Also, there were twice as many people in the class today, and some had brought their children. Finally – I get to do what I love and see the kids. All of the talking, translating, and questions has left me very tired over the past few days, and the kids reminded me what it was all for.

We started the day off by talking about replacement behavior, and they asked a lot of questions about this topic. The first part of the week they kept asking me “how do I get him to stop doing…” They wanted a quick fix answer that will get their child to stop biting, hitting, screaming, etc. I explained to them you have to replace the behavior with a positive behavior, you can’t just get rid of something and not fill the void. Many typically developing students can be told no and then find something else to do. The child with autism finds this very difficult, so you must present them with a positive and appropriate behavior. They soaked this up like sponges. They had never heard anything like this before.

There were many things today that they had never heard and I was surprised… They asked me for a list of symptoms of autism, because they were not sure what it really was. Are any of us sure what it REALLY is? – questionable… but the people here have no resources to go to, no one to educate them on what autism looks like. So, today we walked through an assessment similar to CARS (childhood autism rating scale) and I explained each category that it was looking at, and why. They thoroughly enjoyed going through this assessment. Everyone was taking notes, and writing down what the translator was repeating. They are so thirsty for knowledge, I wish I could give them more. I come home every night looking for more to give them… what resources can I find that they will be able to use?

On that note, I want to say THANK YOU very much to Cathy from ARC. Cathy has listened to my stories, encouraged me along the way, and given me priceless resources to share with Nehemiah. Thank you very much Cathy, Nehemiah is benefiting so much from your support and encouragement.

Today we also went over some things that my school places a lot of emphasis on… consistency, clarity, competency, and also physical management. The physical management section was interesting to go over, but they wanted to learn how to safely restrain a student if he or she became very aggressive.  As for the C’s – I thought these three (yes DHA, I know I left some out – maybe tomorrow haha) would be very important for them to incorporate into their own program.

Tomorrow they want me to discuss staff behavior and what is/isn’t appropriate. This will be interesting because of our cultural differences, so I will simply share what we do at home. I recommended they draw up some sort of staff conduct contract so that they make sure everyone agrees to the rules. They are very concerned here with how people talk to the students, what they wear around the students, and how they react to their behaviors, so I think it will be good to get their ideas down on paper and help them create a contract for all their staff.

Thank you to everyone for following my story and for all your prayers. They are definitely being answered here in Addis Ababa.