Missionaries of the Highway
We started out the day with fitting wheelchairs on top of a van that barely fit through the archway of our hotel! At Missionaries of the Highway we sent 6 children home with wheelchairs! We also had a sensory integration room as well as a rehabilitation therapy room. Throughout our stations we saw a variety of diagnoses. The therapists got to see 6 children each and work on various techniques that the care givers were inquiring about. Students got to play with children, learn more about sensory integration and rehabilitation techniques, and get their hands dirty while fixing wheelchairs. All of us learned more about Guatemalan culture. We are all exhausted but really enjoyed all the kisses blown at us and the smiles we received today! (Erin Strobl, student)
Hope for Home (Daryl’s House)
Daryl's Home (hopeforhome.org) started our day off by getting acquainted with the gorgeous home of Daryl and Wanda who are gracious enough to take children with all types of disabilities into their home. There are currently 12 children in addition to the few kids Daryl and Wanda have adopted. It's been a tough week for Daryl and his incredible family with the death of a newborn they were asked to care for and love until he passed. Daryl and his kids were clearly still shaken, though all were thankful we were there. Each child has a different diagnosis and requires much more therapy than Lisa Monterosso can accommodate in the time she is there each week. As students, we split to work 2:1 with a practitioner and learn from their vast knowledge. Many of us worked with students with cerebral palsy, developmental delays, and sensory integration. We all had the opportunity to work on feeding with different children as well as play with the kids there. As a whole, we're excited to go back tomorrow and work at Missionaries of the Highway on Thursday. While we're all physically and mentally exhausted, we're all in agreement that it's entirely worth it. (Maddy Nave, student)
ABI
Today was our first day of service at ABI (Abrigo y Bienestar Integral), a government-run institution for children and adults with profound physical and intellectual disabilities. ABI is located in Guatemala City, about an hour drive from our hotel in Antigua (two hours during rush hour!). Working in an urban setting brings various environmental challenges-high walls with barbed wire, gated security, less safe access to areas outside the institution. Our team consisted of four therapists, six Xavier OT students, and four translators. Each therapist received a caseload of 5 children to work with this week, but we are also looking at the population and environment as a whole. We immediately went to work evaluating each resident with very limited background information provided. No ages, minimal diagnoses, minimal medical histories-this work was purely observation, physical evaluations, and clinical judgement. We will be providing treatment ideas and care plans for each child over the course of the week, as well as training videos with voiceovers in Spanish (we are unsure about literacy of caregivers to use standard subtitles) in order to help the caregivers learn more about body mechanics, treatment ideas, feeding techniques, and sensory techniques. Our overall impression is hopeful and eager because ABI incorporated so many of the ideas provided last year and we have a lot of ideas for these current children as well as for the site in general. We also have an underlying sadness because this setting is not a foster home or orphanage; the residents here have mostly been institutionalized since birth and will most likely remain institutionalized for the duration of their lives. The oldest resident at ABI is 53 years old! We are humbled to see so many smiles coming from people with so little. Personally, I'm so happy to be working with my insightful and helpful OT students, Jillian and Emilee, and our amazing translator Crystal! We are so looking forward to the rest of the week! (Rakhi Srivastava, Practitioner)
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