Epic Arts Special Education Program

For those of you who have asked me what I do specifically at Epic Arts...here it is:

On Mondays the older class arrives by tuk tuk at 8:30. They sing a good morning song and go through a visual schedule for their gardening class. They are divided into groups and pick up rubbish around the centre, water plants, weed and plant seeds. At 10:00 they break for a snack, usually bananas or rambutans and afterwards they wash their gloves, aprons, hats and boots. 

At 12:00 Epic has a break until 2pm. Yes you read right, a 2 hour lunch break during the hottest part of the day. When I first came I was amazed but now it's not long enough!


Between 12 and 2 I go to Epic Arts Cafe in town for an Ice Coffee with sweet milk and a chicken salad or omelette.The 2 hours goes really fast and it's so hot, you really can't be very active. 

On Mondays at 2pm the younger class arrive and have a hello song and go through a story book. The last book I wrote was about a boy and girl going to the beach and I included activities such as digging in sand for shells, rolling on the beach, getting sprayed by water, eating ice cream, putting on sunscreen and being 'nipped' by crabs. The latest book is about a girl who gets a toothache from eating to many sweet foods and explains how to brush your teeth, quite a pertinent topic for many of our students who already have many rotten teeth from poor diet and oral hygiene. After the story they have free play, either in our wendy house, which is decked out inside with the week's theme, our new playground and sand pit, or water play. 

On Tuesdays the older class cook vegetable noodle soup, Wednesdays they have dance and movement with the VTP (Vocational Training Program) students, who are either deaf or have physical disabilities from polio, and Thursdays they do handicrafts. The handicrafts have included making paper beads and lacquering them with nail varnish, making paper mache bowls, making beaded necklaces and currently doing a textile mural with Kate who is a AVID volunteer from Australia. 

In between lessons I am busy preparing training workshops. I've done one on sensory processing for the special ed team and one on Autism for the whole Epic staff. I've also run a workshop on activities of daily living and backwards chaining techniques using the example of washing clothes. I'm also preparing a workshop for next Friday on Intensive Interaction. 

The last few weeks I've been creating a sensory room and after this weekend it should be completed. It looks great on a $300 budget!

I've also created a wheelchair adaptation and got a floor seat made for Sok. 

Sok has a stretching program twice a week, but it's really hard to get it done regularly as we all know exercise is so boring!


So introducing the beautiful little ones...

SOMATH

Somath with chewy tube. Yay something I'm allowed to mouthe!

SREY PIN

SREY LINE

LEAK

HOAR

SOCHEATA

SREY NICH

VATTANAK

PEATRA

 CHIEN

I am sitting here in a thatched bungalow in Kampot, it’s pouring with rain and I can honestly say I’m loving life. I’m totally and completely absorbed in the moment. Rogue raindrops splash down my screen, blurring my words but I can only look around me at the gullies of water collecting on the pathways of the garden and marvel at the thunder rolling across the expanse. It’s been a freaking hard few months living in my mind, but today I can actually say I’ve found home.  The last week I’ve been touched, challenged, inspired, confronted and reassured. Epic has lived up to it’s name. Last weekend we hosted the band “Dengue Fever” at the centre. The moment for me was when Chok (www.chokfullofgoodness.com) got up on stage with the lead singer and they sung together. It was magic. For someone whose family don’t have the capacity to see his capacity, Epic has become his community and his vehicle for self expression. It was a beautiful culmination of inclusion.

Another moment was Thursday morning at Yoga. Jos from Bodhi Villa runs a yoga session before work on Thurdays for the Epic community. This week Sok joined in. Lying on his rattan mat, consumed with spasticity he extended his limbs and touched his toes with us, giggling infectiously the whole time. I love that kid so much, he and his mum are so poor of material goods, but he has the richest spirit of anyone I know and spurs me on everyday day.

Then on Thursday night, I was invited to the birthday party of Sariya, the 3 year old daughter of Epic’s old tuk tuk driver/classroom assistant. There were prawn skewers, curry, plenty of beer, khmer songs played on guitar, Lilly Allen remixes pumped until the house shook, cream laden cake, sparklers and plenty of dancing. But what got me right in the core of my being was the parents of children in our special ed classes. Channy is a teaching assistant with a daughter with a severe and profound disability. Her daughter, Socheata is unable to care for herself, does not have a formal means of communication, still wears nappies, drools and is carried everywhere. I watched her parents that night, lovingly picking up her long frame and dancing with her, delighting in her smiles and refusing to give up despite her lack of eye contact. I watched her younger sister wipe away her drool with a towel with pride not a sense of burden. It was so powerful in the context of disability stigma in Cambodia, let alone the rest of the world!

Then there is Kagna and Bunteang who adore their dear little boy Rattanak, who experience Down Syndrome. Cheeky, independent and simply delicious, Rattanak is doted on by his parents and the entire community.  Check out this video from a year ago about the Special Education Program http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mw9m_b0B3E

Angkor part 1

 In early July we stayed in Siem Reap for a few weeks and took in the temples. For me it was one of those experiences where you are confronted with how your own life is just one of trillions of stories in the book of history. To see buildings circa 801-1431 and to imagine how these people lived through the inscriptions and pictorial carvings on the walls was humbling. Not to mention the exceptional craftspersonship of the carvings...intricate, whimsical, humorous, fragile, robust, personal and exceptionally clever. Jed and I had a 7 day pass to the Angkor Park and organised a guided tour for 2 of those days. 


David was our guide, he spoke English well and drove us in his air-conditioned car and led us around the temples. On one day we saw 16 temples from 6am to 6pm! Although Angkor Wat is most famous, it actually has the least wow factor compared to all the temples that we saw afterwards.It was built in the 12th century by King Suryavarman and is both Hindu and Buddhist. The temple was constructed as place for buddhist pilgrims all over Asia, was completed in 30 years and is the world's largest religious building. The outer walls of the complex are 1500 by 1300 metres with a 200 metre wide moat all around. 

Lotus motif at Angkor Wat

Lotus shaped towers of Angkor Wat, 5 in all, the tallest being 65 metres

Carving outer gallery wall, Angkor Wat

Water lilies in the Angkor Wat moat

Angkor Wat outer Gallery

Angkor Wat at sunrise

Angkor Wat at sunrise

If you thought Angkor Wat was large, Angkor Thom (meaning big) is a ruined citadel 9 square kilometres in size. It is enclosed by a mostly dry moat and is thought to have housed 100 000 people. People used to live in thatched and tiled houses and tended to rice fields outside the grounds.

The South Gate into Angkor Thom, the next kingdom after the Angkor Wat Complex. There is a northern southern, western and 2 eastern gates, all the same. 

Right in centre of the grounds is Bayon, the temple composed of erratic towers with 216 carved stone faces. Scholars believe the faces bear resemblance to that of king Jayavarman. The lower outer gallery walls are covered with stories of everyday activities, cock fighting, fishing, a woman giving birth, circus jugglers, elephants being ridden and people being thrown to crocodiles. 

Bayon, outer gallery

Detail of the outer carved wall of Bayon

Faces of Bayon

Ta Prohm- Tomb Raider temple

View from the top

Elephants guarding each corner

Apsara with feet on the side as the step were too shallow for feet to face forward. This creates humility when climbing the steps to the inner sanctums of the temple

Moss covered temple stones in the Angkor Thom complex

Carvings in "The Terrace of the Leper King"

Epic Arts

Three weeks ago I started my new volunteer role at Epic Arts in Kampot. It has been completely wonderful. Epic Arts is disability arts charity which works in the UK, Cambodia and starting in China. In Cambodia, it is based in Kampot where I live and consist of a Community Outreach Program, which go out into the community and find out in which ways people are affected by disability and how they can be integrated into the community, a Vocational Training Program, in which deaf and people with physical disabilities learn dance and performance and how to run workshops, and a Special Education Program, which consists of 2 classes of children with intellectual disabilities. It is a very exciting time for Epic Arts, as a new building for the special ed program will be completed in October. There will be two separate classes, one for the older students and one for the younger students, a sensory room, an office a student kitchen and student toilets, a play ground, sandpit, sensory garden, vegetable garden and meeting room. At the moment the special ed program is running in the art room, which currently is not in use for art activities. 


It makes me wonder if all the ground work I did at St Pats in setting up a sensory room, a sensory garden, the playground and therapeutic spaces was in preparation for this! It is quite strange how I have landed on my feet in this role, disability and arts together in a developing country and I still get to work as an OT. I could not actually think of anything better at this stage of my life. It's about time!


This week has been particularly inspiring. Epic has been training up 2 women to be special ed teachers (as special ed is not recognised in Cambodia) and also several teacher assistants. This week has been the start of a 3 week training for the staff, run by Claire, the SEP Manager and myself. I am so touched by this whole process of fostering capacity building in people who would not otherwise had a chance to fulfil their passions for special education. This week Claire has run all day workshops on the history of the SEP. She used a visual road map of who has been involved in the journey along the way and staff were asked to draw the people on a road on butchers paper...I was even represented on the road! Woo hoo! It was such a lovely, inclusive way of representing how the program has evolved and how everyone has had an important part to play in it's development. We discussed what it means to have an intellectual disability, stages in child development, communication strategies for children with ID, teaching strategies for cognitive skills and I ran a morning workshop on sensory processing. 


One activity that really stood out for me was when Claire presented a photo of a "typical" 17 year old boy living in Cambodia. She asked the staff to write around him all the typical activities he would be doing, such as going to school, helping his family, riding a bike, reading books, watching TV, having a girlfriend, smoking, going to bars etc. We then had to imagine this boy had an intellectual disability and the capacity of a 4 year old, and then circle all the activities he would be participating in. Obviously this list was quite limited. Thirdly, in another colour we circled all the activities he would be doing if he had the support of an NGO or disability support service all his life. The staff managed to circle every activity, which demonstrated that the reason epic arts exists is to facilitate access to everything a person without a disability can access, but also to exemplify that having a disability does not need to limit options in life. It was so awesome to have discussions about human rights and dignity in a country where this philosophy is few and far between. It gave me great hope.


The staff are delightful, Sarom will be the younger class teacher and Kagna, who has an adorable little boy with down syndrome, will be the older class teacher. Then there is Roeun, who is a translator and is working on the new vocational program for SEP, Channy, a teaching assistant who has a little girl Sokcheata who has a severe ID, Phea, a 20 year old girl and Tune and the two cleaners. 


It is a particularly exciting time for Epic as we dream big about the future and where our students could be in the community. Chok, a 20ish year old who experiences down syndrome, has an amazing story from having challenging behaviours, no social inclusion and no formal communication a couple of years ago, to now fully participating in the epic arts community and producing his own line of cards and art works. He is such a character around town with his little back pack with a broken zip, stuffed full of photocopied passports and important document that he had picked up some where, wearing women's clothes and turning up at Epic at times where he should be elsewhere! We are starting a new vocational program for SEP and considering training the students to start adapted work at the Epic Arts Cafe, washing motos, making glass bead jewellery, gardening, tending to animals, pottery, photocopying etc. It's pretty ground breaking stuff here!


When I did my Landmark Advanced Course training in January this year I committed myself to being the possibility of social inclusion for everyone. I think it's happening...and it gives me tingles!

Wheelchairs at last!

A few of you have asked about the wheelchairs, and yes I finally got them. And yes, it was as nightmarish as my first attempt, maybe even more so, knowing how corrupt the system was this time. This time I went to the customs office with Mony, the Khmer man who has been acting director of TTLC. I had written a letter on his behalf with all the required information, checked that he had his Khmer ID and the registration documents for TTLC. We handed over the documents and the official took his time going over them. Then he asked "Who is Mony"? I pointed to him and the official said "no he's not, he is Kosal" and showed me his ID card. Sure enough that was his name. Frustrated I explained that he failed to mention his REAL name and he demanded that we go away and re-write the letter (this would be the fourth), with his actual name, his date of birth, his postal address and ID number at the top. Frick! We spent 40 minutes driving around the busy streets of Phnom Penh, ducking and weaving people, bicycles, motos and dogs to find an internet cafe where I could re-type and print the letter. I added the necessary details, and wrote the address shown on Mony's ID card, rather than his current address, just in case the official would complain because it doesn't match. 


So off we trotted back to the customs office. He fluffed around a bit more, stamped each page, told us we had to go downstairs to have someone stamp it again. By the time we got upstairs again it was 4:30, and he said he would give the documents to the right channels and to come back at 11am the next day.


So dutifully at 11am we came back to the office, only to be told that the official was not there and was busy in a meeting. Not knowing whether to wait, our translator explained that it would be best to come back at 2:30pm after lunch break, as it was unlikely we would be able to see him before then. When we came back at 2:30, he eventually arrived at 3pm, saying that he had everything ready that morning and when he came back to the office we were not there. Well perhaps the message could have been passed on to us, so we don't have to guess his every move?! Once the documents were handed back to us, we rushed out to the dry port. Once there, we were informed that I had not yet paid the leg of the shipping from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh. Oh the irony, considering if I had know it would have gone there first I wouldn't have shipped it to Phnom Penh, as Sihanoukville is significantly closer to where I live! So we had to go back to that shipping office and fork out over $200. By this time the port was closed. Another day with no results.


So onto day three, we took a tuk tuk out to the port early in the morning. We were shuffled from office to office for over 2 hours, waiting for databases to be pulled up on computers, admin and processing fees were requested at every stop along the way "you need to pay for the typing", and documents checked over and over. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the way they operated, we went upstairs to a room on the left, then across to a room on the right, then downstairs to a room on the right, then back upstairs to a room on the left, then right, then left...more money requested $3 here, $10 there. No one used a telephone or email for communication, everything was done face to face and I felt like a piece of driftwood, alone and awash in a sea of excommunication, being pulled on an unpredictable current, destination unknown. 

Eventually, bewildered and very near ready to call it quits and just put it down to a big mistake and count my losses, we were ushered to the  nearly empty warehouse. More fluffing around, showed packages that clearly were not wheelchair shaped as they ummed and ahhed over whether they were the cargo or not. Finally we set eyes upon the actual boxes and the process of storing them on the tuk tuk began. 5 boxes got strapped to the roof and 1 in the actual tuk tuk. Now to work out how to get them them back to Kampot, a 3 hour journey. We managed to fit 4 in a van and 2 in a car. Steve is currently helping me adapt on wheelchair for Sok, a boy I am working with and I hope to give another to a little girl with an intellectual disability. 

Siem Reap Silk Farm and Acoda Orphanage

In early July, Jed and I went to Siem Reap. We caught a bus from Phnom Penh which took about 5 hours. Siem Reap was nothing like any other place in Cambodia I had seen. It was very westernised, jam packed with pubs and cafes and restaurants and massage parlours. There is even a street for westerners called "pub street". There are little laneways leading off pub street with quaint Italian cafes, icecream parlours and garden bars, much like Melbourne. Felt nothing like Cambodia, except for the tell tale tuk tuk drivers bugging you every step ("tuk tuk Miss", or "Sir" sometimes!) and the notorious Dr Fish Massage tanks on every corner! Jed was offered heavy drugs several times, must be his suspect shady facial hair. We soon found the markets; the markets along the riverside selling colourful pants and dresses, mostly from Thailand, silver jewellery, shoes, wooden souvenirs and oil paintings of the temples and the Night Markets, with much of the same, but with slightly higher prices for tourists. 


We discovered a gem of a place, The Blue Pumpkin, a bakery and icecreamery with a upstairs floor with wall to wall couches and folding lap tables, menthol infused cold refresher towels and crisp air conditioning. It was a welcome sanctuary from the outside bustle. 

We found out about a free trip to a silk farm, with Artisans d'Angkor which was an eye opening experience. Here, mulberry trees are grown and the leaves are picked and fed to silk worms which reside in trays in the nursery, where they are fattened up to produce silk. They eat for 26 days continuously and when they are fat enough, they make cocoons, expecting to turn into silk moths. Unfortunately for them, this will not be the case as the cocoons are boiled to kill the pupa and make it easier to extract the thread. 

Coocoon shells in the sun

Raw silk thread being extracted from boiled cocoons

Getting thread straight from the cocoons

Working at the loom on intricate patterns

The raw silk thread is rough and thick, and dyed using natural dyes from herbs, plants and even rusty nails. The silk is thinned further then hand weaved on primitive looms by women who earn less than $90 a month. The work is intricate, repetitive and time consuming. I was fascinated by how these women have the art down so precisely. The silk thread is actually dyed at intervals along the strand, in order to create the pattern when it is woven on the loom. So the colours on the threads all need to line up to reveal the pattern - talk about tedious! I have much admiration and respect for this craft, but also great sadness for the quality of these women's lives, holed up in a warm shed doing back breaking, finger numbing craft for such little pay. As tourists we feast upon purchases of silk scarves in the market, without a thought for the person who crafted it.

Check out all the threads she has to keep track of!

The same evening we visited Acoda Orphanage for a free Apsara dance performance as recommended by Trip Advisor. The children put on a musical dance performance every evening and afterwards tourists are asked to give a  donation for their education.