The project of My Children's House of Hope is to provide interactive learning tutorials and remedial education to 80 mother-and-deaf-child pairs coming from Payatas, a depressed, urban-poor community the majority of whose residents make a living scavenging from the garbage dump nearby.
My Children's House of Hope.
Bahay Bata 127
The sign language training will enable the deaf child to communicate with his/her mother and, with her acting as interpreter, with the rest of the family and the community.
Both will receive remedial education in basic literacy and numeracy to supplement what the child is being taught in Special Education (SPED) classes in the public elementary school in the community. This remedial education will enable the deaf child to accelerate his/her pace of learning, thus catching up in those areas where deaf children usually lag behind; the mother will be taught similar lessons to enable her to tutor her child at home and to monitor progress of the child in class.
Home tutoring will reinforce the remedial education as well as create a closer bond between the mother and her deaf child.
We intend to build and furnish the Community center in Payatas, Quezon City, where the project is piloted and hopefully become a continuing, sustainable program. This project will immensely impact the lives of deaf children and their respective mothers, all of whom reside in an economically depressed community. The deaf children will be able to communicate, through sign language, with their mothers and, through them, with the rest of the family and the external community. This ability to communicate will end the isolation that deaf children often experience due to the communication barrier created by their hearing disability. It will enable them to establish closer ties with the other members of their families.
The remedial education to be received by both the deaf child and the mother will supplement formal classroom instruction given by Special Education (SPED) teachers in the public elementary schools in the community. It will enable the deaf child to accelerate his/her pace of learning and catch up in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, areas where deaf children often lag behind. The remedial education given to the mother will enable her to tutor her deaf child at home, thus reinforcing the formal lessons taught at school and creating a closer bond between them.
Supplemental education given to the mother will also enable her to become more sensitive to the unique needs of her deaf child, to build a supportive and harmonious family environment, to protect and preserve her family's health, and to augment the family income and manage the family's budget more carefully. The Parent Support Group for the Deaf (PASUGOD) will extend the women's concern to bigger community instead of merely their own families.
Finally, the feeding component of the program will enable the deaf child to improve his/her state of health.
Because many of the Payatas children suffer from malnutrition due to poverty, the deaf children enrolled in this project were sponsored into physical center activities and will be regularly given highly nutritious food during the entire duration of their participation.
Expected long term changes
We expect a profound long-term change in the status of the families of the participants who will be involved in this project. The improvement in the communication between the deaf child and his/her family will contribute to more cohesive and mutually supportive family relationships, as opposed to the often dysfunctional relationships caused by breakdown of communications. The acceleration of the learning process by deaf children, as reinforced by their own mothers tutoring them at home, will build a stronger educational foundation that will become the basis for their center of employable skills, positive work values, and human relationship abilities when they become adults-qualities that will help them find productive and dignified work despite their hearing disability. They will thus become self-supporting and productive instead of remaining totally dependent on the charity of others. Educating the mothers, on the other hand, will enable them to become better parents and to contribute in a very positive and meaningful way to the improvement of their families' health, economic, and psychological condition. Their self-esteem will expectedly improve.
In the short-term, the improved communication and the home tutoring will facilitate bonding between the deaf child and his/her mother and between the deaf child and the rest of the family. The deaf child's school performance is expected to show improvement. The feeding component will increase the deaf child's weight and improve his/her state of health.