New approach to children with disabilities

Five-year-old Mousa Suleiman was born with Down's Syndrome and severe speech and mobility problems. But after receiving physiotherapy for just over two and a half years at the Zahrat al-Madaen Association Social Services Centre in Hajar al-Aswad, just outside the capital, Damascus, Mousa can now walk and pronounce a few letters of the alphabet. "I am very happy to see my son recovered. My son received physiotherapy at the centre when he was two and half years old. I was trained how to follow up with him at home and give him the necessary treatment," Mousa's mother Dibah, who has eight children, told IRIN. Since joining the centre's club, Dibah has benefitted greatly from meeting other mothers, which has helped her to understand her own child's situation better. "Now my son can open the computer and choose the game he wants. He can also open the television menu and point to a children's channel which he likes to watch," Dibah said happily. This community-based approach to help disabled children is the first of its kind in Syria and has been key to achieving success, health professionals says. "Fifty percent of our success is due to training mothers how to deal with their children," Suhail Haydar, a physiotherapist at the centre, told IRIN. "There are more than 700 people with disabilities out of a population of 300,000 living in the 3 sq km Hajar al-Aswad area," Raghda Ammoura, Director of the Hajar al-Aswad centre, told IRIN. The needs of those with disabilities led Italian NGO Movimondo to help implement the community-based programme in conjunction with the Zahrat al-Madaen Association, Ammoura said. The project is also supported by the European Commission Humanitarian Office (ECHO) and the embassies of Britain and Germany. "The rehabilitation process is carried out through tight cooperation between people with disabilities, their families, the community itself and the centre," she said, stressing the importance of follow-up to make the centre's services effective. Ammoura also said that one of the benefits of this approach was that disability was no longer treated as an individual issue. Now mothers in the area accept their children with disabilities, and do not hide them or chain them to chairs, she said. "We receive any child with physical, mental and emotional challenges," Ammoura said, noting that part of the centre's focus is to help parents develop communication skills with their children and teach them how to make teaching materials on their own. The centre's services are free and cover speech therapy, physical therapy and early detection. It also provides educational classes for children with special needs, literacy classes for women and home visits to children who are unable to travel. Many in the area suffer from extreme poverty which makes access to the centre harder for them. Movimondo representative in the Middle East, Marie-Helene Kassardjian, added that the involvement of mothers in the project had been instrumental in its success and helped the acceptance of the community-based approach. "Through the centre we continually hold awareness-raising courses for parents. We bring mothers together periodically to increase their knowledge, understanding and hope about the disabilities of their children, and to discuss their problems and encourage and strengthen each other," Kassardijan told IRIN. According to local authorities, Syria has over half a million people with disabilities and since 1970 the government has passed a number of laws supporting them. Last year, a law was passed which obliges government bodies to ensure 4 percent of their staff are those living with disabilities. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour supports NGOs in their work to help people with disabilities and has been working with Movimondo in this regard, Mohammad Imad Al-Izz, director of services at the ministry, told IRIN. Following the success of the community rehabilitation programme and a growing demand for its services, a new building is being built in Hajar al-Aswad, with 450,000 euros (US $586,080), or 75 percent of the total cost, provided by the European Union (EU). "The strengthening and enlargement of the Zahrat Al-Madaen Social Centre, for which the new ward will be built, is part of an overall project to provide technical assistance to associations dealing with vulnerable children and adolescents, including those with special needs in the poorer areas of Damascus and Aleppo," Andrea Matteo Fontana, head of the Economic Cooperation Section at the Delegation of the European Commission to Syria, told IRIN.