Day 7

Anini
Today Anini was, once more, challenging...As my first day visiting the site I could not help but feeling sad and frustrated. The way some of these children are spending their "lives" (if that is considered living a life) is inconceivable for most of us. Children in Anini's casa 1 wake up everyday and are seated in their wheelchairs (most of them fitted inappropriately or missing parts, then head outside the house where they spend the morning being attacked by flies and bugs while they slowly slide off their chairs. Most of these kids are unable to adjust their own posture or control their extremities that keep flailing out in the air while their heads just hang on their sides. This scene takes places while the "tias" that are taking care of them (2 people for 12 severely involved children)fight against flies and try to get some of the kids out of the wheelchair for a few minutes. Trying to figure out how to help these kids has been one of the most difficult situations I have faced as an OT. One more day it is interesting to compare and contrast how different our experiences have been depending on the site we visited.

Adela (Occupational Therapist)

Marina Guirola
Wow! What a remarkable experience today!! We had our final day at Marina Guirola and we can't stop smiling. Today we created care plans and saw some of the kids we saw yesterday. One highlight of the day included: helping with snack time while doing the Macarena and jumping roping with the kids. We were lucky enough to have a dance instructor come in for the day and teach the children dance moves. He taught us a famous dance which moves included shimmying, pumping our arms and shaking our bums! But the children truly showed us up on the dance floor including Gerado completing the sprinkler while turning himself in his wheelchair. What was truly remarkable was that this dance instructor was also in a wheelchair and took time out of his day to teach the children.

Rose (Occupational Therapy Student)
Emily (Occupational Therapist)




Another highlight of our day was Gustavo. Gustavo has been a resident of Marina Guirola for over 18 years. Gustavo brought so many smiles to us while we were standing him for over 20 minutes. Gustavo was laughing and dancing while the student sang "Los Elephantes". During snack time while everyone was eating their snack and dancing, I went over to Gustavo to dance with him. During this time, Gustavo asked a staff member to come and talk to him. Gustavo left the area with the other children but then shortly returned and the staff member said that Gustavo wanted to show me a video. Gustavo then showed me how he can type with his head pointer and then the videos that were shown were about Nick Vujivic who was born with no legs or arms and how he knows that God loves him. Please see one of the videos shown here (be prepared to tear up):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O3xDmXmHU8&feature=related

The staff member then later on handed me a book of all of Gustavo's contact information and letters/emails from other people who have been touched by Gustavo. Of course, I gave Gustavo the link to the blog, my email address and I wrote down his email address and physical address.

When we were leaving Marina Guirola, one of the nuns told me that we changed the life of one of the kids (Gabby) since we recommended she stop wearing both her leg braces and foot braces due to pain. Then when she spoke to our entire group she said "We are doing God's work and working with God's little angels." Yes, I was tearing up. What an amazing remarkable and enlightening day! Thank you to everyone at Marina Guirola and thank you Gustavo.

Emily (Occupational Therapist)