Centro Ann Sullivan del Peru (CASP)

This is from Keri again. I graduated yesterday! I am officially done with OT school! It´s little bit anticlimactic but still a very good feeling. The family we live with here was so sweet and bought a cake to celebrate at dinner. I´ll include a picture of that later.

Now that we've shown you pictures of where we live, I figure it's high time to tell you what we've been doing here! I promise it hasn't been all fun and games like some of our blogs might suggest. We have worked HARD here. Most days were between 9 and 11 hours of work, including many Saturdays. Part of the reason I haven't yet blogged about CASP is the overwhelming task of painting an accurate picture of all this incredible center does in a blog that doesn´t bore all of you!

CASP, or the Centro Ann Sullivan del Peru, is a school for kids with developmental disabilities, but it is so much more than that. The center mostly serves kids with diangoses like Down's Syndrome, Autism, or other developmental disorders. The students served by the center range from about 6 months old to 55 years old. They have a family model, which means that they fully include and support the families of the students. Most students only come to the center for 2-4 hours a day. They have a morning and an afternoon session. Because they spend so little time at the school, the families are expected to provide the rest of the training at home. Each student has goals they work on, much like an IEP in the States. However, each parent also has goals to work on in order to better support and teach their children. The families come to the "School of families" every other week where they support each other and get training and encouragement from the staff. Every student in this center (about 400 total) lives with their family.

The center also has a complete community focus. The students don't just learn math or writing, they learn it in functional ways to support their ability to work in the community (for example, learning to count money to buy food at the market). For the older students (14 and up), half of their time at CASP is spent in the community, learning to follow directions and be good workers with tasks like cleaning, making beds, etc. CASP has over 100 alumni working in supportive employment (at various levels) in the community. Some additional examples of the activities of the center include:

• Providing English classes, dance classes, and other activities for the parents during the school day (many come from far away to bring their children and wait at the center until they are finished)


• Providing consultation to a nearby orphanage on how they can improve how they handle behaviors


• Having the students put on bake sales and spa days for the students to practice money changing and appropriate work behavior

Because OT is rare down here, CASP has never had an OT come to the center. Many of Liliana´s (the director of CASP) contacts in the US who are OTs have expressed an interest in sending OT doctorate students down for fieldwork, but because no OT has been there, they did not know what the students could do. Therefore, my main job here has been to evaluate all of the programs and to write a report about where OT could enhance what the center is doing and what projects OT students could work on. Besides that, I have made adaptations in the classrooms, visited students´ homes to answer questions and make recommendations to parents, created low tech adaptive technology, and visited an orphanage twice to give them suggestions for their kids with physical disabilities.

My schedule has been nuts, but it has been rewarding, and I have learned a LOT about how to work with kids who have developmental diabilities. I am glad to be done with fieldwork, but I will not be forgetting this place anytime soon! C.J. has actually been really busy here too and did everything here from filming to making cardboard adaptations for me to editing my protocols I´ve written to giving suggestions on CASP´s building.

We have only 1 day left here in Peru! We will try to blog quickly tomorrow, but please pray for a smooth trip on Monday home to CA for Christmas (with no unexpected stops in other countries, please!)