Child, occupational, brush, autism, mirror, Gayane, adaptation, integration, noomee, virtual, parent, cucumber… Everything circles like a scattered mosaic in the space, in uncertainty, around me. I don’t understand anything from this, my questions have no answers. Who am I now? What feelings do I have? My intuition lingers like the movements of the child sitting at the extraordinary table. My mind turns away, I think to myself. What is intuition? – An insight, an instinctive sensation based on experience, which inspires the sense of something, a guess. When I photograph, intuition begins to work like an elemental process. Now, upon facing the white page, it doesn’t work, it is silent.
The pictures stimulate the learning of everyday actions, while working with fasteners develops their fine motor.
The first thing that I notice in the work of Gayane with the child, is, besides the verbal interchange, the dialogue of the bodies: person to person, hand to hand, my space to your space. An endlessly approaching, crossing, then distancing distance, and the unmanageable saliva hanging from the small jaw in gravitation.
Foam is one of the various means which serves stimulating visual, olfactory, and tactile impulses.
I am self-contained again, it’s the third day that I wander in the corridors of the center, my mind lingers in its stations. To tell what is ergotherapy, which gives the person with special needs the opportunity of involving in the processes of different spheres of life – beginning from peeling a cucumber, up to knotting the laces of their shoes. Or what is independence in your own everyday life for a person who is deprived from it. Itching your own head with your own hand is a fortune which we do not appreciate most of the time. Or what is autism, social integration for the one who will find it difficult to look in the eyes of someone from that society for greeting or good-bye. What is the special needs of education, integration for these people. Understandings which can be defined better by specialized websites. To live this space, where integration is equal to either me, or you… Where it becomes possible to reflect and adapt this space like the mirror of the room – the distance between me and you, between them and the other.
During ergotherapy constant interaction is one of the elements of treatment for the cognition of body, adaptation of senses, development of physical and cognitive skills.
P.S. A story about why a curly haired or curly-minded therapeutist decided to create a virtual bridge for the people with special needs, which will help them adapt to the surrounding conditions and solve the curly everyday life.
Gayane is an Ergotherapist, who works at “Luse” center, the author of the project “Noomee”.
Noomee is a mobile application, which helps children with autism to develop their everyday skills and become independent.
– Why noomee?
– The application helps work with more children thanks to the automatization of several materials and the opportunity of enlarging the services. We think that with the help of our application the child acquires new and important skills, which help develop the “new me” of the child. That is why we have decided to name it noomee, which is equivalent to the expression “new me” expressed by a child’s tongue.
“This photo story was funded through a Department of State Public Affairs Section grant, and the opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the Author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State.“