“They just need extra care”

When you have the mettle to take on daunting tasks, you don’t wait for things to happen. Like that world famed brand, you ‘just do it’. With the same belief, this Pakistani duo decided to take a path that many can see, yet very few would actually venture.
Having completed their education abroad, Nawal Hafeez and Bushra Resham returned to Qatar two years ago with the passion to educate others. And they hit the ground running. It was beyond just taking up teaching jobs.  
Determined to make their contribution even bigger, the two friends decided to cater to the segment of society which many had given up on — children with special needs. Mentally challenged, these children would either drop out of school or could not get into one. They would thus face segregation in the society at large.
After a year-long research and study of the education system and how these children could be mainstreamed, Bushra and Nawal came up with the idea of educating children with special needs in the same environment of a regular school with other children.
Going around with the proposal, they found their first hosts in The Next Generation (TNG) school. Providing them with space and facility, the school allowed them to kick start their project. After a year, a batch of five students successfully passed out of the programme at a graduation ceremony held last month.
“While researching about the education system here, we found gaps and surprisingly children who were in those gaps were those with special needs. What I mean by gaps is that a large number of children with special needs are out of schools,” Nawal tells Community during an interview about their project, its execution and future plans.
“Parents of some of those children in school were not satisfied because of financial issues, language barriers or stalled progress of their wards. So we came together and decided to take the initiative and do something about it,” says Nawal, turning to Bushra, her friend from school days, and now a partner in the initiative.
Born and brought up in Doha, they went for their respective university degrees and returned in 2013. While Bushra has a 17-year-old sister with Down’s syndrome, Nawal did her thesis on autism and the issues that a family faces in seeking government or other help.
Upon their return to Doha, the first step was creating awareness about the problem and gathering support from the community.
“We started with a Facebook page called ‘Special Needs Community’ so that we could get connected with parents who have special children at home and are facing issues that we think are very common in our community, and the community at large,” Bushra chips in.
The response was encouraging. Besides parents, many teachers, too, connected with them and showed their willingness to play a part in the initiative.
Meanwhile, they also connected with Pakistan Welfare Forum, a Pakistani community welfare organisation, and discussed different proposals of collaboration. “We wanted to give these children quality education, which is both affordable and is in their language,” says Bushra.
Financially backed up by PWF with TNG providing the infrastructure, they took in a class of five children in the first year of the project. Majority of them were with Down’s syndrome and autism. When they take in a child, he or she is first assessed for specific needs.
The children are taught in six different areas including communication skills, literacy, mathematics skills, behaviour and language. Along with their teachers, Bushra and Nawal being managers of the programme, plan the whole year for every child.
Their goals for the year, with activities for each and every day, are set. “Our major goal is to make them independent and not necessarily to have a degree at the end,” says Nawal. At the graduation ceremony, the five children performed different activities independently to the satisfaction of their parents in the audience.
Bushra and Nawal say the children achieved more than 80 and some even 90 percent of the goals set for them.
The main problem for the segregation of children with special needs in the community is lack of awareness among parents and the community about their needs.
“Society in general is not aware of what special needs are and how they could make the community more positive for these children. And because of such reaction, parents are very hesitant in bringing these children out in the community,” feels Nawal.
“Most parents also think that because of their disability and being out of school for so many years, these children are perhaps not capable of getting an education and ultimately making their own livelihood,” adds Bushra.
Among other more material problems are lack of affordable schools where these children are taught in their native languages.
“What people do not realise is that these children are capable of forging ahead and progressing. They have a different way of learning and just need a little extra special care which we as a community have failed to give them,” says Nawal.
In an ideal scenario, she thinks, mainstream schools should do the social integration. When mainstream children have children with special needs in front of them, they would naturally be sensitised on how to interact with them and better understand their needs in daily life.
The special children, in return, would have peer interaction with mainstream children which will boost their confidence and enhance their development.
In the same way, every teacher or educator, Bushra feels, needs to be aware of how to deal with any kind of child. “If a child has a particular need and he or she needs to be educated in a particular topic, the teacher must know how to modify the techniques according to his/her needs,” she adds.
Nawal and Bushra aim to spread the programme to more schools and places so that maximum number of children can benefit. With staff and infrastructure limitations, they can only accommodate so many children. But there is a huge demand, says Nawal.
“We do have children waiting to be taken in. When they got to know about the programme, they were interested to come in, but we could take only so many as we did not want to over-burden our teachers,” explains Nawal.
One teacher caters to two children, who are young adults. And one teacher caters to three younger children. At the moment, they do not intend to change this equation. With a bigger infrastructure and more trained manpower, they do however, plan to take in more children.
Nawal and Bushra thank Riaz Bakali of TNG, Dr Fatima Janjua, a physician in Neurodisability and James Hall, a Speech Pathologist, for their advice and help in planning and management of the programme.