Ideas for Sharing
Information from This Book
2CHAPTER
9
Most of the information in this book will be useful to health workers and village
rehabilitation workers who see many disabled children. Some of the information will also
be useful for the family of a disabled child. However, a family with one disabled child will
usually not need, or be able to afford this whole book. It has information about so many
different disabilities, that parents may have difficulty finding the information that applies to
their child.
Also, learning from a book is often not the best way to learn something. A lot of methods,
aids, and exercises can be learned more easily from other persons, through watching and
through guided practice. But after a village worker has taught parents how to do certain
exercises, or shown them an example of a homemade aid, printed instruction sheets
with clear drawings can be a big help. Sometimes they can make the difference between
whether the recommendations are followed at home, or not.
There are certain pages or parts of this book that you may want to give to families after
you explain and teach to them selected exercises or activities. For example, to the family of a
girl with arthritis, you may want to give some of the “Exercise Instruction Sheets” at the end
of Chapter 42, and the “Information Sheet on Aspirin” on p. 134. You may also want to give
them pages from Chapter 16 on arthritis, and to mark the exercises and activities that are
important to their child.
To the family of a young child who is slow to develop, you may want to give pages from
the chapters on child development and early stimulation activities (Chapters 34 and 35).
For a more advanced child you could give the family material from the chapters on self-care
(Chapters 36 to 39).
Depending on the interest and reading ability of the family, you may want to give
them a whole chapter (or chapters) about their child’s disability. For example, the
chapters on cerebral palsy (Chapter 9) or deafness (Chapter 31). An older child who is
paralyzed from a broken back might appreciate having a copy of the chapter on spinal
cord injury. Letting him and his family take home the chapters on pressure sores and
urine and bowel control could even save his life! His family may also want to take home
plans for making a low-cost wheelchair, to see if the carpenter and blacksmith in their
village could make one.
In Project PROJIMO in Mexico, the village
rehabilitation team keeps a big file box with copies of
the different pages and chapters that they have found
most useful for giving to families. (In fact, the exercise
sheets at the end of Chapter 42 were originally prepared
separately to give to families. Later, we decided to
include them in this book.)
If you have a computer and internet access, you can
freely download and print pages you need from our
website: www.hesperian.org
Suggestion: Keep a file of pages,
chapters, and information sheets
to give to families.