Back to School

As the air cools and leaves begin to change their color in the US, the sun begins to burn brighter here in Ghana. Similar to the US, September not only begins a change in weather, it also signifies the reopening of a new school year. During the summer months, AACT had about 15 students who regularly attended the center with just about one caregiver for every child. Many of the other students traveled with their families or stayed home with other siblings on vacation. Over the past few weeks, all of these students have returned. Now a typical day at AACT has about 25 students, being taught by 12 caregivers, 3 directors, and a few volunteers. Not including the daily visitors, there are over 40 moving bodies in the center on a regular basis, at least half of whom have autism.



Due to increased attendance, it became necessary to find more effective ways to keep groups of students engaged. With support from Auntie Baaba and help from two new volunteers, we put together a more structured morning routine for the middle classroom. We choose this room to focus on first, because they typically have the most students with the least amount of caregivers. The routine involves the students identifying “who is here today” by moving pictures of themselves to the appropriate area, going through the day of the week, month, year, and then identifying the weather. So far, it seems to be working well!



There has been a lot of other excitement over the past few weeks. On September 8th, a television series called Impact Africa came to film an episode at AACT. This included footage of the students activities and interviews with Auntie Serwah and I. Last week, the Rotary Club came to present a donation to the center. There were over 25 members who came for the ceremony. It was a great opportunity for them to learn more about children with autism and the services provided at AACT.



On top of all of this, I have been continuing correspondence with a variety of others. Caroline Pongo, the creator of a local educational puppet theater, came to the center last Thursday. Her and I discussed getting the students involved with a puppet making workshop, as well as planning a performance at the center. Stacey Reynolds, an Occupational Therapy professor at Virginia Commonwealth University has agreed to include AACT on their annual service trip next May. This is especially exciting because there are currently no Occupational Therapists in Ghana. This coming Monday, I have a meeting with Nana Ocran, the Director of Education at the Ghana National Museum, to begin setting up educational programs at the museum modified for children with autism.

In regards to administrative tasks, I have been involved with developing job descriptions and creating an employee code of conduct. These will be compiled into an employee handbook and be available in the future for new employees. As volunteers come and go, we have been asking for their feedback as well, in order to continuously improve the current volunteer handbook. The point of all of this is documentation. Keeping records, putting job rules and regulations on paper, tracking the number of volunteers in a given time period, etc. It all helps to strengthen an organization’s permanence.


Last but not least, the Caregiver Challenge, a fundraiser started about a week and a half ago, has already raise 130GHc (about equal to about $90 US Dollars)! Auntie Serwah has created a bank account that is specifically for donations. The goal is to not touch this money until there is enough to build, buy, or rent an additional, desperately needed, facility.

All in all, things are progressing! And as much as I miss the beautiful fall weather, the warm sun doesn’t feel too bad. Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
Casey

Dear Readers,

It has been a great couple weeks at AACT!

Back during the first week of the service project, Brad and Lori took baseline data on functional communication opportunities. Their data was taken during snack time on 15 separate students. According to the observations and despite dedicated staff, the baseline showed minimal to no spontaneous communication. After three weeks of training, making communication aids, and modeling effective techniques, we found their spontaneous communication rose to an average of about 6 opportunities during a 5 minute period. Over the past weeks, I have taken follow-up data. In most cases, the students’ opportunities to functionally communicate had stayed consistent, while a couple others actually increased. This was great news! The caregivers are continuing to use their acquired skills and resources and the students are learning meaningful communication, slowly but surely.


Along these lines, back in July the Global Autism Project volunteers made many new PECS pictures available in each classroom. These are proving to be very useful, especially within the youngest classroom. In addition to this and after a meeting with Auntie Baaba & Auntie Serwah, we found it necessary to being creating visual schedules for each student. With the help from one student, one caregiver and Auntie Baaba, we made 14 individual schedules along with an extra sheets of various motivational pictures. Providing the caregivers use the time tables effectively and the students positively respond, a new PECS organizational system has been put into place to make it easier to create more of these in the future.

On Friday, July 21st Auntie Serwah and I presented to 31 New York University study abroad students about volunteering at AACT. It was organized by their academic director and included many other Ghanaian schools, NGOs, and businesses looking for volunteers. Personally, this was a remarkable opportunity. Just five years ago, I was that same study abroad student being first introduced to the beautiful country of Ghana.


Last week, I began to focus on fund raising ideas. With families in and out of this center every day looking for services and one serious traffic problem in Accra, there is a true need for a second facility. Keeping every day needs in mind, I anticipate raising enough money to fund an entire new center will be a long process. With that said, we decided to start fund raising ASAP. The first fundraiser, the Caregiver Challenge, will begin this Friday. The objective behind this is to have the staff compete to see who can raise the most amount of money in one month. There will be a chart displayed publicly that tracks each caregivers progress and an overall total. As incentive the person who raises the most will earn 20% of the grand total, with second and third places also receiving a portion and certificates of accomplishment.

Other planned fundraisers include professional days at the center, monthly benefit dinners, and a Walk for Autism Awareness in April. The key behind all of these is that they rely on a local population. Everything that I have been doing here is done with the idea of sustainability first. Always asking: Will the center be able to maintain the work the volunteers have been doing in the future? Will they use these resources, trainings, and fund raising ideas to continuously enhance the services provided? For now the answer is yes. According to our data, although only officially on communication opportunities, there has been a heightening of motivation to work more effectively as a center.


As for me, life in Ghana is exciting as always. Over the past two months, I have already learned more both personally and professionally than I anticipated for my entire stay here (including a tolerance for geckos in my bedroom and a serious love for plantains in any form).

Take care,
Casey

Greetings!

It’s hard to believe it has already been 5 weeks in Ghana. Despite feeling more accustom to the routine, every day presents new challenges and unexpected obstacles (such as shoes breaking in mid step and unannounced bus route changes). On the other hand, I also am constantly blown away by Ghanaian generosity and the beauty of this country.

This past Wednesday, I had the privilege of finally meeting Auntie Serwah, the founder and director of AACT. She had left for the US right before our service trip, to accept the Heartspring Award. This is an award that recognizes innovation and creativity in special education worldwide. There are only ten recipients of this award every year. From what I have seen and heard, she deserves it. Congratulations Auntie Serwah and Akwaaba (welcome – back)! For more information about the Heartspring Award check out http://www.heartspring.org/award/.

I really focused this week on modeling positive reinforcement. Not just here in Ghana, but around the world we tend to focus on negative aspects within society. Watch the news for ten minutes and there is guaranteed to be stories about violence, corruption, dishonestly, disrespect, etc. As a global society, we need to shift our attention. Encourage people with stories of success; inspire improvement through positive innovations. This is the general philosophy behind positive reinforcement. We need to make sure the students are being encouraged to participate (not yelled at), following through when asked to complete a task (versus letting students run away) and then praising them for listening to our directions. By modeling positive reinforcement throughout the school day, the students are being given the praise they deserve while also providing naturally occurring examples for the caregivers to learn from.

When not working directly with the students, caregivers, or completing administrative tasks, I continued to help spread awareness about the centre. Through the recommendation of a German Occupational therapist, who visited the centre a couple weeks ago, I have gotten in touch with a woman named Caroline Pongo. She is the creator of Beans & Gari, an educational puppet theater performance. Our hope is to have her bring the show to the centre come September.

Every day there are new developments with the centre. With Auntie Serwah back from Heartspring, she has made a point to emphasize the importance of attitude. Baaba has just completed an Autism course and plans to train the staff in the coming weeks. Nana Akua, a speech therapist, has the next couple weeks off of work and has said that she would like to help brainstorm ways to fundraise. Never a dull moment here at AACT!

…or in Ghana for that matter! Yesterday, I was invited to attend a traditional Ghanaian funeral. This was an all day event, filled with dancing, drumming, eating delicious Banku & stew, while trying to stay cool under a large Baobab tree. I crawled into bed last night exhausted.

Thanks for reading!
Casey

New interactive way to teach number identification!

Saturday August 8, '09

Once again, another busy week here in Ghana…

Every morning at the centre, the students sit in a circle and routinely sing good morning to each other and participate in a variety of other basic welcoming songs. It is a wonderful opportunity for the students to learn appropriate social interactions and communication. Equally as important, it is a time for the staff to be modeling and positively reinforcing this behavior. This week I was able to participate in the morning circle not only to help with these goals, but also as a way to continuously build the relationships between myself, the staff and students.

One of the goals of the Global Autism Project is to also help establish more connections for AACT. Ultimately, these are local professionals and community members, as to keep with our sustainable practices. Although sometimes due to limited resources this is not as readily available. To my knowledge the centre does not have an occupational therapist and in fact no one knows if there even are any in Ghana. So I turned to the internet, where I quickly found a couple different US universities that had conducted OT service projects in Ghana. The most overwhelming response was from Stacey Reynolds, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University Occupational Therapy Department. This past May, she came to Ghana with a team of students. They were involved with a few different service projects, but mainly all relating to OT services. This week we have started communicating about how they could most effectively help AACT, while also understanding the idea of sustainability.

Along the same line, I have been exchanging emails with one of the academic directors of the School for International Training – Ghana. 5 years ago, when I first came to Ghana, he was actually one of my directors. He works in conjunction with the University of Ghana and has shown immediate interest in our efforts to raise autism awareness.

On Monday and Tuesday afternoons, Jessi (an Ikando volunteer studying special education at Vanderbilt) and I conducted trainings on effective lesson planning. This involved basic lesson planning order of operations, as well as brainstorming with the staff on creative ways to teach these lessons. Throughout the week we not only saw the staff utilizing some of these ideas, there was one caregiver that came the next day with an entire week of lessons plans written out for her student!

Thursday, two art students from the University of Ghana came to conduct an art therapy session with all the students. Then on Friday, our good friend Louis Wonder conducted a drumming and dance workshop with all the students and staff. Every day there are new families walking into the centre, interested in services. There is actually such a need, that AACT currently has a waiting list for students.

Thanks for reading!
Casey

Saturday August 1, '09

Last weekend Lori, Brad and Alicia all flew back to the US. It was sad to see them go, but know they accomplished an incredible amount over the course of their three weeks in Ghana.

Work started with the development and implementation of preference assessments. These will be used to determine potential reinforcers for communication opportunities and academic work. In collaboration with Baaba, we helped to create an afternoon activity schedule. This not only gives the students more structure, it also puts selected staff in leadership positions, increasing overall accountability.

Throughout the trip, Lori and Brad put together workshops for the staff. These included trainings on the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS), Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT), and Functional Behavior Assessments. Along with the workshops, we all helped to make the necessary PECS pictures cards and provided consultation on their use. The BI Capture was also set up. The AACT staff was taught how to use it when evaluating problem behavior or modeling effective techniques.

Last, but certainly not least, Alicia built four specially modified workstations. The materials used were all locally acquired, in order for more of them to be created by AACT staff in the future. Needless to say, Lori, Brad and Alicia were fantastic on many levels. They will certainly be missed here in Ghana.

As for the past week...

Baaba came into work Monday morning with a mission to clean. Every day we choose one room or space to tackle. Broken, chewed, unuseful toys were thrown away. Selected toys and teaching tools, including all stuffed animals, were washed. Once inventory was taken, we were able to make every child there own set of supplies. Each pouch included a new box of crayons, colored pencils, a pen, a pencil, sharpener, and eraser. The individual classrooms were also given the appropriate toys and teaching materials according to the needs of the students.

Once again, a personal thank you to Lori, Brad and Alicia for being excellent volunteers. Can't wait to work with you again next summer in India!

Going now to enjoy some delicious grilled plantain.
Casey

Friday July 24

Greetings!

This is Lori again. We had a very exciting day today at the centre! In the morning Brad helped the centre with evaluating a new potential student. I went with the Casey to print out all of our training summaries as well as the graph showing the number of functional communication statements made by students during snack before we started training and after we started training. The data was very impressive! Casey will be taking data a week or so after we leave so we can measure if this change in staff behavior (increased opportunities for communication) is maintained. Considering the enthusiasm by the staff over the impact this has had on the students, I believe that this change will be maintained after we are gone.

In the afternoon, Brad and I did our third Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) workshop with the staff. The response from the staff was amazing! In all three workshops the staff had excellent questions and were really beginning to understand the functions of behavior. After one of the workshops, two staff members came up to Brad and I to tell us this was the best training they had received in five years working with kids with Autism. They told us that often times people in the community turn to them for answers about what is Autism and how can Autism be treated and they are often unsure of the answer. They said the workshops from this training trip helped them understand Autism and Applied Behavior Analysis so that they could answer the questions of people in their community. One of the staff members even told us that every day since the beginning of our visit she has gone home and shared with her family what she had learned from us that day. All of the comments from the workshops were incredibly powerful, but these in particular were very touching and meaningful to us. It is such an honor to be able to provide knowledge and information to individuals who are so dedicated to their work and hungry to learn more.

During the FBA workshops we also showed the staff how to use the BI Capture. In the morning, the staff set up the BI Capture (with a little guidance from us) and used the BI Capture to get videos of a student’s biting behavior. The supervisor at the centre will review these videos with the staff to determine the function of the behavior and be able to come up with an effective intervention plan.

Alicia finished modifying the desks today! They look absolutely amazing and are the best desks I have seen for Autism intervention. The pull-out drawer leaves space for data taking and lesson plans without placing too much onto the desktop. The beads make data collection easy which allows for faster teaching. There is even a spot on the desk where the reinforcer is placed so that staff does not forget to determine what the child will be working for before beginning teaching. The staff was very excited about these new desks and we look forward to their feedback as they begin using them.

After our day at the centre, Brad and I had a drum workshop with a local drummer. This was a truly remarkable experience! We sat in his drum workshop (where you can watch cattle passing by) and played our African drums together! Then we had a traditional ceremony where liquor is poured on the floor (and a little on the drums) as a blessing. I have to say, I have never had an experience quite like it!

Alicia and Casey went to the market and then met us for dinner at the vegan restaurant (again) where we had some delicious veggie stir fry, pasta and yam fries. I am very sad to say goodbye! I look forward to keeping in touch with the staff at the centre as many of them want to continue to learn more about Autism and ABA. I cannot express how meaningful this trip has been to me. Being able to see an Autism centre in another part of the world and collaborate with the staff there has been a great pleasure and wonderful learning experience.

As always, thanks for reading! I look forward to sharing future trips with you!

Afua (this is my Ghanian name!)