Gringas on tour

We are Verena and Lilli – two austrian occupational therapists. Its already our last week here and that is why we need to tell you all about our great experience.

We are kept busy with doing many house visits, and we really enjoy them a lot. That means; to see how people live here, to get to know the children and their families and to evaluate and help them directly where they need it the most: in their daily living activities.

Until now we evaluated more than 35 kids and some of them are already on the list for the new school. This week we could give them some exercise-programs; advices for both parents and kids, some adaptions and sometimes we are just there listening to them and their worries.

Working as an occupational therapist in this project means to be parttime psychologist, hobby doctor, logopaedist, dietist, physiotherapist and even showmaker every once in a while. You need to be creative here so that even a coconut can be used as a standing aid.

We saw many kids with very severe handicaps, many are caused by infections, which could be easily prevented if the health system was better.

The good thing is that there were already some wheelchair donations. They are quite good, but they needed some important adaptions. So this week, we took measurements, some pliewood, some carpenters and adjusted four of those wheelchairs.

Now Celeste for example is able to sit in a good position, which is great for eating, watching television for her respiratory system or just participating in family life. There are more wheelchairs to adjust, this will be our main project for the coming days because whe are leaving on Tuesday. Snif. But hey, there are other really good therapists coming.

Visiting the kids in their houses we recognized that there is a big lack of toys, games or knowledge of the parents on how to stimulate their children. Therefore we did a workshop on how to make toys easily out of garbage.

This week our workshop is about how to improve the capacity of eating and drinking. And we have many more ideas (but little time left). We want to do 3 Topper (play-boards for wheelchairkids) that they are able to explore and play with different kinds of toys. Furthermore there are other kids who would need some communication-advices.

Anyway we'll pass them on to the therapist team and we are sure they”ll make a good job!

Besides long working days we got to know Puerto Cabezas quite well when asking for directions, chatting with the nice, friendly people here or just hanging around in a hammock under a palm tree at weekends.

We love the diversity of working and living in Nicaragua. And we hope that we could also give something to all the great kids we met. They did, at least, give a lot to us. An open mind, happiness, sadness, experience and hope.

Love and peace,
and hasta luego,

Verena and Lilli