Day three: Thursday, July 9th

Hello from Accra!

This is Lori. I am a Board Certified Behavior Analyst from Phoenix, AZ who is working with Brad to provide training on Applied Behavior Analysis at AACT. Today, we learned all the names of the students and staff. During this time we learned that in Ghana, your name is based on what day of the week you were born. If you are born on Friday and you are male your name is Kofi. Saturday is Kwame, Sunday is Kwesi, and so on. The staff is extremely friendly and was very helpful providing prompts and praise as needed as we acquired this new skill of local naming procedures.

From our observations, the staff is doing an amazing job using the data sheets and skills taught during previous trainings. The staff at the AACT is very talented and dedicated to their work.

We are very fortunate to have this opportunity to work with such wonderful people.
Our specific focus at AACT for the next few weeks is to teach the staff how to increase the spontaneous use of functional communication of the children. Today we began taking baseline data (looking at the student’s current levels of performance) on spontaneous functional communication. Throughout our training, we will continue to measure this behavior to determine how successful our training was at teaching the staff how to increase this behavior for their students.

Today the children made beautiful splatter paints (inspired by Jackson Pollack). This activity was led by a local artist who volunteers his time at the Centre. He has great talent and a wonderful passion for working with children with autism.

Alicia has begun design and construction to modify the existing furniture which will allow the staff to teach the children more efficiently while recording data. Looking for the tools proved to be quite an adventure!

In the evening, Brad, Molly, Alicia, other volunteers for AACT and I went on an adventure in search of an infamous Ethiopian restaurant. Unfortunately the restaurant was not found, however, we were able to meet some of Obama’s Secret Service Agents a local Italian restaurant.

Thanks for reading!
Lori