Its been two weeks back in Ghana and things have picked up right where they left off. Before leaving from the U.S. I had the pleasure of meeting with Prof. Joel Arick, the author of STAR and FACTER autism therapy programs. After explaining my background and role in Ghana, he very kindly agreed to donate some items to the schools here. To my utter amazement, he was able to acquire the entire first and second levels of STAR, and the FACTER program with 3 training DVDs. I was blown away by his kindness as well as endlessly thankful towards STAR Autism Support for their generous donation.

As mentioned in the previous entry, my time here will now be shared. During the week, I will be doing speech therapy at Coledic (soon to be Multikids) as well as helping with the development of a program called Towards Independence. This is an hour long class everyday geared toward teenagers with autism who are in need of enhancing their life skills. So far we have done lessons on dish washing, going to restaurants, talking on the phone, times of day and telling the time, useful measurements, watering the garden, ect. No only are we teaching the students, it also gives me a chance to teach some of the other teachers here about lesson planning and essential adaptations and/or additions for students with autism in regards to curriculum. This increases the program's sustainability.

Using the STAR program guidelines and training DVDs, I'll be doing staff trainings at AACT every Friday. The first training, next Friday, will be focusing on positive behavior reinforcements, something that I feel particularly passionate about.

On top of all of this, International Autism Awareness Day, the 2nd of April, is only about 9 weeks away!!! This may sound like a long time to start preparing although not to Ghana. Over the next 2 months, I plan to really focus a lot of my spare time (haha) on networking and planning for events.

As for my re-entry back into Ghana... well according to most, I have lost all my tan and apparently ate too many Christmas cookies. Ah, it's nice to be back.

Many thanks for reading.
Casey

P.S. Good luck to the Ghanaian national soccer(football) team as they face Egypt in the African Cup of Nations Tournament finals this Sunday.

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