On Sunday, we took a day trip to the beautiful city of Guanajuato, which is about 2 hours away from Querétaro. The city of Guanajuato seemed magical, with all of it’s colorful buildings in different sizes, as well as its alleyways and tunnels, which make you feel like you’re entering another world. There is also a “Callejón del Beso” (Alley of the Kiss), its name came from the fact that the balconies are so close, couples could reach out and kiss. This city was romantic and captivating, it’s really no wonder that it inspired the pixar staff from the movie “Coco”!
Statue of El Pípila
Next, we went to the Museum of Mummies/Museo de las Momias which is a museum that is dedicated to showcasing mummies that are naturally occuring due to a unique combination of elements that prevented decay (http://www.momiasdeguanajuato.gob.mx/). When people died in Guanajuato, they were placed in wooden caskets and then moved into a cement vault. Families needed to pay taxes on their loved ones to stay in the cemetery and after 5 years of not paying, the government can take the body out. Due to a combination of certain elements in the local water, the wooden casket absorbing all humidity and the lack of oxygen in the concrete vault, the bodies that were exhumed remained perfectly preserved. Some even had preserved hair, teeth and clothes.
Pictures of the “Momias”
We then went to a restaurant located in a beautiful old house that also included an art museum. At the end of the day we drove back down into town and walked around the Mercado Hidalgo which is a large market with crafts, clothes, and food.
On Monday, Datie Rogers and Genesis Felizola conducted parent interviews in Spanish at Andale Para Oir about the usage of their child’s cochlear implant/hearing device using the Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (MAIS). MAIS is a parent report scale which evaluates a child’s skills in meaningful, real-world situations. They asked the parents to rate their child’s utilization and management of their cochlear implant, asking questions such as “What is your routine for putting on your child’s device each day?” and “Have you ever checked your child’s device and found it was not working (or headpiece had fallen off), but s/he had not noticed or had not told you?” on a scale from 0-4 (0= Never, 1= Rarely, 2= Occasionally, 3= Frequently, 4= Always). They also wrote down any additional parent observations, concerns, or report. This was an enriching experience as it allowed them to learn more about how the child is performing at home, and the unique experience of managing their cochlear implant/hearing device.
For this Wednesday, we were asked to lead the activities in Andale. We plan to follow the schedule they already have implemented, and add some activities ourselves as well. First, we’ll start with morning greetings, including a hello song and organizing the visual schedule for the day together. During physical education (educación física), we’ll play musical chairs and have the children listen for when the music stops to sit down. After physical education, we’ll read a book together for Story or Sequence time (Cuento o Secuencia). Genesis, Datie, Sara, and Jessica will each act out parts of the story as we read a book about children traveling through a forest (bosque) and swish swashing through high fields of grass, glip glopping through puddles of water and mud, and encountering a bear and it’s cave. Finally for Arts and Crafts (Artes Plasticas), we will have the kids draw themselves and practice the parts of the body together (head/cabeza, shoulders/ombros, arms/brazos, legs/piernas, etc). The kids will also color in parts of their body using the four primary colors red, yellow, blue, and green, and together we’ll practice the Mexican sign language for each color.
This week at Gigi’s we had the pleasure to continue to work with our wonderful Language therapist who have shown and taught us so much about how to effectively work on a wide variety of goals with their clients. For example, at Gigi’s playhouse, we have had the great pleasure of being able to see our language therapists incorporating so many areas of development in an individualized and age-appropriate approach. The therapists think about each of their client’s individual needs, incorporate personalized materials that target functional language, movement, pre-literacy skills, models and feedback. It is incredible to be able to get specific feedback on how to teach, model and adapt language and articulation goals in Spanish. It has been a unique learning experience for all of us since each interaction we have had in Spanish allows us to analyze our own metalinguistic knowledge.
It has given us a deep appreciation for the importance of effective and rich language models for children. We have seen how collaboration, an openness to learn and seeking out information from Native speakers who are working as speech therapists is absolutely vital when working with children and their families in Spanish. Gigi’s Playhouse has such a warm and inviting atmosphere, and we have felt so welcomed since the first day we entered. We love walking in the hallways, sharing stories, coming down for coffee in the kitchen and seeing the clients and their families smiles. We are grateful for the incredible experience at Gigi’s Playhouse and we have been blessed to know all the people who are behind the amazing work they do.
On Monday, we held a debate in Spanish class in which we used the professional terminology we learned about hearing loss and deafness to make our arguments for/against having deaf/hard of hearing children use only oral language to communicate, or only sign language to communicate. This assignment was meant for us to practice our abilities to speak in spanish about the pros and cons of only using one or the other, using the terms we learned. We also discussed the benefits of including both, as well as using cued speech (palabra complementada), gestures (gestos), visual cues (pistas visuales), over articulating (sobrearticular), and lip reading (lectura de labios) as examples of some strategies parents can use with their children at home.
We’re making the most of our last week here in Mexico by experiencing more of the culture and history, taking the lead in our sites with supervision and following the schedule/plan already provided, and using the language we’ve learned so far in our Spanish classes every day. We will truly miss the wonderful people we’ve met here during these three weeks. These three weeks have been a life-changing experience for all of us. As clinicians, we plan on working with families and children who speak Spanish as bilingual speech language pathologists, and learning the terminology in our Spanish classes has allowed us to acquire the language needed to provide services for these families. We now feel more prepared to work with this population and look forward to putting everything we’ve learned into practice when we get back. Coming to Mexico, providing services at Gigi’s Playhouse and Ándale Para Oir has been a dream come true for us. Although some of us are native Spanish speakers, and all of us are fluent in Spanish, we learned a lot more than we expected by actually working with these children, their families, teachers, and Mexican speech language pathologists. We are forever grateful for this trip, and will remember the people, as well as experiences, for the rest of our lives. Below are some photos of us with some of the amazing people we’ve met.
– Sara and Genesis
