The Very Hunger Caterpillar – Thursday 4th Feb 2010

Made it to assembly on time! Go team Australia!

(Yes… this is most of the children at the school… it’s quite small)

The touristy stage of today is yet to come, as the Prime Minister is coming to Melaka this evening. We have been invited by Zaidee to go to the function celebrating his visit. 50,000 people will be attending the function, which is for dinner. So not only do they have to find a place big enough to squish 50,000 people into, it must be big enough to seat that many for dinner. Zaidee took us for a drive to see the venue the other day… it is a big, sandy, blank block of land. Parking will be horrendous (to go with the driving over here… noone stays in their lane or indicates and there seems to be a complete absence of merging rules. Also, it is only required to wear your seatbelt in the front seats… very safe)!

I will add more on the spectacular tomorrow, as I won’t get home until around 1am.

On a different note, Malaysian hospitality has been fantastic. People have driven us places and tried to make sure we are as comfortable as possible. We seemed to get the same questions every morning and afternoon however:

1) Are you hot?

2) Did you sleep well?

3) Have you taken you breakfast/lunch?

We need to make a sign with the answers:

- Yes, very

- Yes we slept well

- and No, we haven’t had breakfast yet, but no we don’t need any

Speech

We observed 2 classes this morning, and participated in another…

Class #1 and 2 = Physical Education

To be honest, they seemed the same as physical education in Australia, except possibly less advanced. Where Australian kids would be playing football, netball etc by years 4 and 6 (which were the 2 levels we observed today) these children were quite uncoordinatedly playing what looked like poison ball. I am assuming that sporting activities are conducted in circles to enable signing between teachers and students.

We did not participate in these classes as the teacher did not talk to us at all. I feel like I am not interacting enough with the students here, but it is very difficult when our communication with the teachers is limited, let alone our communication with deaf, non-English speaking children.

After yesterday’s session with Zaidee and the hearing aids, I was feeling quite dismayed about the usefulness of hearing aids; however, today’s 3rd class answered some of my questions about their success.

 

Class #3 = Art

We made caterpillars! It was nice to join in the activity with the children and have some contact with them. They communicated with us the best they could… that’s not to say we always knew what they were saying.

     

   

The art classes and life skills classes so far have reminded me of vacation care or day care in Australia. I am yet to see the educational benefit… although it would be interesting to compare the classes with deaf classes back in Aus.

As  I mentioned earlier, the hearing aids definitely make a difference to 2 of the children in this class, who can talk quite well and do not have to rely solely on sign language from the teacher. It was great to hear some of the children here communicating with spoken language. Most of the children make noise, whether it be laughing, a grunt or a wailing sound – these noises can be quite confronting and can change your perception of the child. The grunting and wailing can make the child seem less intelligent than they are and this is something I had not considered until experiencing it myself.