For months now we've been telling you about Autism Belize's efforts to bring voices to the voiceless, through their tablet distribution program for non-verbal children.
It all started with a box of names - in which organizers placed the names of dozens of kids who would benefit immeasurably from the devices.
Today Christy Almeida told us that she'd receive 20 more, and this time they are IPads. Here's what the Autism Belize founder says about how these devices are impacting lives.
Christy Almeida, Executive Chair, Autism Belize
"What we've done is some of our parents that have tablets already, we put apps on them, so if we include that, we're just about 40 kids that have gotten a communication device from Autism Belize. Because I approach the teachers and the principal and we look at need, we have our speech therapist now here and our behaviour and occupational nurse is spending time at Stella Maris doing assessment and things. This one wasn't necessarily picked out of the box, their names were there, but we organized by priority and need. Several of these are going to start therapy though our therapy adventures program, so we choose them because of need and the recommendation of teachers and the therapist and we put the apps on it and they are ready to go."
"I'll tell you a story: I have a teacher from Julian Cho, really passionate about these kids and she came up for the power pro training on her own time from PG every Saturday for a month to do this, because she wants to learn to help her kids, so she found this young lady whose been out of school for a couple of years, she is non-verbal, she called me up, she said Miss Chris, she can learn and talking to her and I can see that she is understanding you and I said okay honey, we sent her one of these ipads, 2 weeks later I got a picture of her at school at Julian Cho trying to do the work and so excited to be there. The iPad aren't for them to surf YouTube or go on Google or whatever, this is a necessity so they can communicate, so they can go to school and tell the teacher what they are learning, what they need, how they feel - so it's a small thing, it's not these huge things that you see some other do, but I feel like its significant."
If you or your businesses would like to help any of the other names in that box to have a voice you can contact Christy Castillo Almeida and her organization, Autism Belize at 613-4170.
