School and Fun

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were all days of school visits in the morning and enjoying Mombasa with friends in the afternoons.

Dorothy and I walked to her office at the Mombasa EARC (Educational Assessment and Resource Center), where she gave me some background on training for assessment teachers and the assessment process itself. The Mombasa EARC has staff offices and workshops, including one that builds wheelchairs from the ground up.

A custom-welded wheelchair from the Mombasa EARC
(click to enlarge)

EARCs fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Their duties include:

* Assessing and identifying children with special needs 

* Providing guidance, counseling and courses for parents of children with special needs

* Establishing special needs units in regular schools

* Referring children with special needs to special schools or programs or for medical examination and treatment

* Offering seminars for teachers and other professionals working with children with special needs

* Providing hearing aids

* Collecting data for research and planning

The local agency coordinator told us that Starkey Labs, a Minnesota firm that produces hearing aids and diagnostic equipment, is donating 1000 sets of binaural (right and left ear) hearing aids to the Coast EARC (basically southeastern Kenya) in March, and a European company (sorry - can't remember which) will be coming to build a soundproof booth for hearing assessments soon as well.

Next door to the Mombasa EARC is the Tom Mboya School for Cerebral Palsy. One of the teachers who had attended the training last week had asked me to visit. I spent a couple hours there observing, participating in classroom and feeding activities and offering suggestions when asked. As in most programs for the developmentally disabled, there are so many bright children whose bodies won't let them communicate very efficiently. I saw so many who could benefit from some type of augmentative communication.

Poverty shows itself in some unexpected ways. I saw children wearing one shoe and carrying the other. Their shoes were so tight that even the slightest difference in foot size meant that one foot could not be forced into their shoe. I tried.

I had lunch with Stephanie and her mother. Stephanie is hoping to train to be a Speech Therapy Assistant and had wowed everyone at last week's training with her trash-to-treasure AAC adaptations. We spent several hours talking at their house, walked on the gorgeous beach just a short distance behind their house, fed the monkeys that inhabit their trees and tried to avoid the holes their dogs have dug burying shoes and other family treasures.

One of the many caves on the beach