The objective of the program is to reduce the academic failure in the children that are receiving help from Mediterranea NGO, so that they may finish their compulsory education and so as to encourage them to carry on studying with the aim to get higher qualifications and training. This will help them to have a better future when they become adults. The crisis has shown us that people with qualifications are four times more likely to get a job than those without.
Our objective is to strengthen their maths, reading and writing skills in the two official languages. This will make the studying of other subjects easier for them.
We also intend to stimulate the habit of reading by creating a lending library with books for children and teenagers.
We are also trying to convince the parents about the importance of studying and completing the basic educational requirements.
We will give a total of one and a half hours tuition a week and the kids will get a snack after the lessons.
As most of you know we now have 5 children with special needs in Abugida. The new children have been evaluated by our team of Specialists in Child Psychomotricity, and the first children to be accepted in our program have been reassessed. Various case specific apparatus have been made to help the children in their mobility and in the training of it. Some of our volunteers discovered a hidden carpenter and engineer inside of them and those things that they could not build were made by the local carpenter.
In this picture we observe Besurikade, quite a character, one of the newcomers, happy as punch with his new walker.
Laura, our senior Occupational Therapist, sent us this picture of Habtamu. He is a little boy form la Sebeta that comes to the Messi room every day for stimulation therapy. This picture is impressive, it shows how Habtamu has learnt to crawl, he had not been able to do so before in all of his five years of life.
Laura informed us that the teacher and monitor of the Messi, Kedist, works very well, and that Laura often writes to her giving her advice as to how to continue with the good work and developing her skills.
Kedist's professional abilities are evident by the results obtained in the stimulation and therapy carried out on little Habtamu.
The work carried out by the monitors in the Messi with the children that go to the Sebeta for help and are not children form the actual Sebeta Blind Children's school, is 100% volunteer work, which is admirable and heart-warming.
