Independence & coping with everyday activities

Hello!

My name is Joakim, I'm 29 years old and was a part of the group that was on exchange in Dar Es Salaam. Traveling from the tiny village of Sogndal with only 7000 inhabitants, to the biggest city in Tanzania with a population of 7 million, was quite a shift and contrast to experience and live in. The same goes for the temperature, which changed from -4℃ to +40℃. Quite overwhelming in the start, but it quickly changed to be a wonderful experience. Where growth, learning and new perspectives took place. I was one of 18 participants in this years exchange project by NOREC. Which aims to improve life quality of children with special needs, through practice implementation of UN human rights. I'm also a third-year student at the Western University of applied sciences (HVL), studying to be a social educator (Vernepleier).

In my part of this series of blog posts, I shall try not to repeat too much of what has already been written and said before by the other participants. So if this is your first time on this blog, I would recommend starting HERE, to read the older posts first. Then begin with Synnes "Raising awareness" to get the full picture.

During our exchange, we spent our days at Uhuru Mchanganyko Primary school. This was with the children with special needs. In short, they were split into three different classes. Deaf, blind & Deafbild. For my part, most of the time was spent with the deafblind.

This was very challenging, as communication was very limited. But we managed some trough the tactile senses, and by guiding them with our hands, assisting and helping along the way. For these children the focus was not on learning difficult subjects, but rather how to be independent and to do basic everyday activities in their lives. Such as washing your own clothes, go to the bathroom alone, eat and drink without support and so on. To read more about this please check out Noras blog post HERE. 

Besides this, we tried to have fun and play with the children. And seeing them smile, learn and have fun really gave us a beautiful feeling of accomplishment while staying here. We also had a workshop for their teachers, and made a tactile stimuli/touch board for the children to explore, which Sara wrote about in her BLOG post earlier. Check it out.

This was my first time working with children, and I have learned and grown a lot through our exchange. About culture, inclusion, the UN conventions, and perhaps mostly about the importance of recipocity. Which is one of the core values of NOREC.

Continue for photo gallery:

Below I have put together a little collection of pictures taken of Dar Es Salaam: