The following day we continued our training. The 35 teachers and 20 parents have been working so hard with us. Eight days of training for 6 hours each day is not easy to go through and they have been engaged the entire time. Some of our team members commented that this group has learned the information quicker than any other group of adults who have gone through the training. We are so proud of our Maldivian friends!
Our training is proving to be extremely meaningful. We have received an incredible amount of positive feedback. In fact, one of the parents went home after a day of training and applied a strategy with her son that she learned from Lizzy. She said it was like a miracle! Her son responded right away :) She said that the training she is receiving from our Knowledge for People team has taken away much of the stress that she has been feeling since her son was born 7 years ago. Hearing things like this makes all of our hard work very worth it!!
In addition to receiving positive feedback from parents, we have found that training the teachers is going to be helping many, many children. Not only will it be benefiting the students who have autism, but also their classmates and the teachers themselves! One teacher reported that she has a new student coming to her class soon who has autism. She said she would have had no idea how to help him to learn had she not had these trainings. We have heard from some of the parents who we worked with at the Maldives Autism Association (MAA) that their children get sent home from school every single day because the teachers have not been trained about autism. That is the thing with autism. Children with autism CAN learn, but they learn differently from the rest of us. They must be taught in a specific way in order to see the most possible progress. It's not anyone's fault if they don't know how to teach a child with autism...they just need to be trained!
We worked with 25 children and their parents at MAA. All of these children are on the waiting list and currently receive NO services. There aren't any other services available in the Maldives and the MAA is at maximum capacity serving 30 children currently with 2 sessions--one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We just found out that the waiting list went from 34 families to 54 just since we arrived 2 weeks ago! They need more space and are hoping to receive a piece of land from the government in order to build a proper center. They are also in desperate need of more funding.
Today is our last training day. We are really going to miss our new friends! We will be doing Skype sessions to follow up on training, but it won't be the same as being with them in person :( We are confident that they will implement the knowledge they learned efficiently and effectively. We are already so excited to come back next year!!!
