Anyways, here I am in Cagayan de Oro for the second of LINK's summer trainings. This one is a week long, as it included parts one and two, unlike last week which was just part two. Moving quickly though these trainings – I can’t believe how fast they are going! The training at Tagaytay finished will. I was the last presenter, on Friday morning. My topic was speech therapy with deaf and hard of hearing children. First, I talked about speech science and the process of speech production, and then I discussed speech and language assessment and therapy for the classroom teacher. We provided the teachers with some helpful materials, and they all seemed very appreciative. Throughout the week, I had so many of them tell me that they are looking forward to the presentation because they have a couple of hard of hearing students who could benefit from speech, if only the teacher knew how to support them. I hope I was able to give them the information they need to really work with these children!
After Tagaytay, I spent a day and a half in Manila, and then to Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao, southern Philippines. Training number two! This is the first training LINK has done in Mindanoa, and 60 teachers have come from all over the island. All are teaching special education (or, as they say here, "special children"), but many have no or minimal training, especially working with deaf and hard of hearing students. Some are regular education teachers who have been placed in the special education classroom. With this training, LINK hopes that many more deaf children will be reached. Despite the length of this training, there is no time for me to present. I wasn’t sure when I came – LINK had told me maybe or maybe not, and now we know the answer. Instead, my job is to interview teachers to really get an idea of what their current situations are like, before training. I am looking forward to some enlightening conversations! They did give me another job yesterday, which was explaining the difference between Signing Exact English and American Sign Language. This was fun and is something that I can easily talk about, and I had Ricky, who is deaf, to accurately demonstrate the signs. Of course, the teachers wanted to know which signs are better to use. Anticipated question. And while I believe that ASL is more beneficial to the students, I had to be careful what I said as to not go against LINK, who is teaching them SEE. I told my true feelings in the end, just very carefully:) And other teachers shared their thoughts too, which were on both sides of the issue.
Mindanao is having a lot of energy problems right now, so for about 5 hours each day, we lose power. Never know when it's going to be. This is how is was explained to me (for Manila and Luzon, at least) - there was a big typhoon last fall, and the dams overflowed and there was widespread flooding. You can still see the damage all over Luzon, with piles of washed up trash in Manila and washed out mountain roads. After this, another typhoon was coming, and so the dams were emptied in anticipation. When the typhoon never came and with the current dry spell that followed, the country was left with little water in the dams and limited power source. Whoops! So we live by the sun more and more each day (no joke, first night bed at 8:30, then 7:30, and last night 6:45!) and I'm enjoying how wide awake I am at 5:30 each morning. It's a shame I left my new headlamp at our last hotel in Bohol, but I can survive:)
I’ll write later as I get through more interviews and continue to learn about the deaf education situation here in Mindanao.
Presenting to the teachers at Tagaytay - must sit from pain of burned leg:(
See the volcano? Taal Volcano (they claim one of the smallest in the world) from the beautiful Maryride Convent.
One of the million pictures I was asked to take - they still crack me up!
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