Activity of daily living (ADL) for deafblind children in school
My Name is Nora and I am now a social educator (vernepleier). During my education, I was on an exchange trip to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, where I was part of a project work at a primary school for children with various disabilities and needs. My project group and I were mostly in the deafblind unit, which consisted of totally deafblind children, children who were deaf with reduced vision, and blind with reduced hearing.
The teachers at the deafblind unit said that for these children to have the opportunity to be independent and fend for themselves when they get older, they choose to focus on activity of daily living (ADL). They did this by for example every morning gathering the children at the table to eat breakfast, where the focus was on being able to eat independently and with good manners. Afterwards, some of the children did the dishes. Others fetched water in cloths and watered plants. Children who could see led those who could not. During the day there were other activities, such as cooking.
The children who had some vision or hearing were given, in addition to the ADL exercises, some school tasks such as reading and writing - normally or with braille. Due to a lack of resources and only 1-2 teachers in the deaf-blind unit, it was impossible for the teachers to give all the children close follow-up at the same time. The teachers therefore mostly tried to have activities where everyone could participate at the same time in the early part of the day and made arrangements for working on tasks in books later in the day with the children who could. By then the totally deafblind children had returned to the dormitory and the teachers had better capacity to follow up the rest of the pupils.
When I and the other students were at school, we contributed as best we could to the follow-up of the children. Of course there were some challenges as we didn't know much of either Swahili or sign language, but we learned more and more with each passing day, and we came a long way by using body language. We learned a lot from the teachers at school and also experienced that they were grateful to have us there.