A Children’s Workshop
for Making Toys
49CHAPTER
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If a rehabilitation program
is to achieve a strong base in the
community, it needs to involve
large numbers of local children.
There are many important
ways in which village children
of various ages can take part,
playing and working together
with disabled children. We have
already discussed how children
can help build a low-cost
‘playground-for-all children’.
Another way that village
children can contribute to
a rehabilitation program is
by helping to make special toys for
disabled babies and children.
Children often design and make excellent toys.
This child from Vietnam puts the last touches on his
homemade truck. (Photo: UNICEF/Jacques Danois)
In Project PROJIMO in Mexico, village children help out in this way—and enjoy
doing it. In addition to the toys that this voluntary ‘labor’ produces, it also brings
together non-disabled and disabled children in a creative work-play relationship.
At first the children at PROJIMO made
toys in the same workshop where the
disabled staff was busy making braces,
wheelchairs, and other orthopedic
equipment. But soon things got too
crowded. The children often played while
they worked (which is natural), and a
few important tools got broken or ‘lost’.
While there were advantages to letting
the children work in the same shop
with skilled disabled craftspersons, the
team finally decided to create a separate
‘children’s workshop’ equipped with its
own basic tools.
Animal puzzles, like this one made by village children,
help a child learn to use his hands, and to match
shapes. (PROJIMO)
In this workshop, children are invited
to make educational and useful toys
—’useful’ in the sense that they help
with a child’s early development,
providing stimulation, exercise, use of
the senses, and learning of skills.
As the children or disabled workers become more skillful at making toys, some can be
sold to help bring in money to the workers or program. Some of the toys and dolls made
at PROJIMO are sold to visitors. In Jamaica, disabled young people run an economically
successful factory, making wooden toys. Toys made at the Life Help Center for the
Handicapped, Madras, India, are sold world-wide.