An interesting experience

A year ago, I spent two months working with children with all sorts of different special needs as well as their teachers in a small school (280 children) about 15 km from Kathmandu, Nepal.

Fifteen km. might not seem like much to you, but on a good day, it was a two hour drive -- on a bad day it could take as long as 4 - 5 hours. There are few real roads in Nepal, and as my Nepali friends like to say: traffic signals are more of a suggestion than a law.

After living and working in this school that there are so many differences between special education and the nature of disability as I know it and how it was being perceived by my Nepali hosts. I won't go into a narrative of my entire two months at the Bright Horizons School, but I will tell one interesting story.

Every evening a young girl would come up to my small apartment and just stand in the doorway and not say a word. This happened for about 8 or 9 days before I started to inquire about my young, but shy friend. She was 8 years old and like all the other children in the school an orphan and from a completely destitue village in rural Nepal. She had been in the school since she was 3 years old and was a fairly good student but since she had suffered from severe malnutrition for the first three years of her life she suffered form varying learning disabilities and cognitive problems. But, it appeared to me that she was primarily depressed. So, when I was asked what to do with her, I suggested that a teacher take her out of the school compound once a week for a walk to the nearby village to buy her a "sweetie" while having a chat with her. I though that she could use some quality time with an adult, alone, after spending her life in an orphanage with 280 kids.

A week went by and she didn't get her walk with the teacher. Another week went by, and then another. Finally, in desperation, I made the appointment myself with the teacher, hoping that this would get things going. It didn't help. After 7 weeks, she still didn't get her walks.

And then, it dawned on me ... the penny dropped. Life in Nepal is based on the collective and our Western view of special education is based on the individual. I was speaking a language that her teachers could not understand, and they were speaking a language that I could not understand. Interesting.

I think that it calls into question my own ethnocentricity in how I view the "rightness" of child-individualized special education and how that may not be appropriate everywhere in the world. It certainly wasn't appropriate at that school in Kathmandu.

My own little interesting story.

Tell me yours so I can learn from you.

Tom, I read your story just knowing that a teacher spending private time chatting with the child would work wonders. I was sorry to read the ending! I understand about cultural approaches but I just feel sorry for the child whom I believe would have so benefited from 1 to 1 support.

I have worked with US Aid in Macedonia conducting teacher training in secondary vocational schools for several years. But on one trip I was asked if I could visit a family whose child was recently diagnosed with autism. The father is a doctor and the mother is a pharmacist, but they had no idea about how to support their child. There are no programs in the schools. They are on their own. Although I brought communication books for them to use (including Velcro which is not available in the country) and demonstrated some techniques, I left the home that night with the mother crying and the father fighting tears. They were overwhelmed. All the materials and literature we have available in the US of course is not translated into the Macedonian or Albanian languages.

Just another example of what is happening in other countries….

I don't have the direct experience of the previous two authors, but I do have some secondary experience with the4 education system in China. My husband travels to China frequently on business and maintains an apartment there. He has a Chinese liaison who lives at his apartment who handles translation issues with the factories there. This Chinese young woman speaks English and was educated in a very interesting way. For her elementary years, she was educated by a visiting teacher who was put up by various families in the village. When she got old enough, (8 years old) she would hike down the mountain with her friends from the village to live in the nearby "city" to learn their lessons. These children were packed up with rice and other food that they carried on their backs. They would live at the school until their rations ran out. They then would hike back up the mountain to get more rations and to visit their families.

What is so amazing to me is that this young woman is my daughters age: 25 and she managed to learn her lessons and to go to college so that she could learn English.

Mary

Due to the confucious philosophy, education has been highly valued in every single family.
Therefore, it is unusual to see many parents try so hard to get their children educated.
Recently, English has been viewed as an international language and people have to learn to speak English well in order to increase their own competition in the society. However, the learning process of English and Chinese is totally different. According to the research, American children frequently utilize comprehension during the learning process of English, they would like to understand and decode the pattern during the learning. However, Chinses children tent to use memorization during the learning process; they are taught to repeat the same words several times if they can't remember it. Two different learning processes would cause different results, which may influence their learning motication in the future.

Chenya