Loewenstern Fellowship Envelope #1

Open 2 days before your scheduled departure


What specific social issue will you be addressing during your Fellowship?  Absent any in-country exposure, what is your understanding of the scope of this problem?

The inequality of integration of those with special needs is going to be what my fellowship is focused on.  I have the interesting placement of an orphanage for children with special needs and also an orphanage for children who I'm assuming won't have special needs, so I'll be able to see the differences between how Cochabamba, Bolivia handles this issue.  Will there be a lot of differences?  I suppose it'll depend on the severity of the special needs, how the children are placed into the orphanages (both are government-run), and

A cursory search on Google a few months ago brought me this article,

"Before World Vision came to Colomi, a rural region east of Cochabamba, the women there tried to organize a support group for mothers of children with special needs. In Bolivia, children with special needs are so stigmatized that their mothers are often blamed for their challenges and encouraged to abandon them.  Children who cannot walk must use their arms to drag themselves across dirt floors. Often, they are not bathed or spoken to for days.

The support group in Colomi attracted just a few families who faced the ridicule and scorn of the community and a lack of resources and education to really improve the conditions of their families."

The article then goes on to talk about how World Vision helped by implementing a program for the children to receive care and for the mothers to talk among each other and share advice and support.  World Vision started this program a year ago, the author says.

Awesome.  So perhaps a lot has changed since the article written... when was the article written anyway?  Like the 1990s?

Not quite... unfortunately, it was written in Aug. 2011.

On one hand, this article is about a rural area, so one can expect a much more industrialized city like Cochabamba to be better.

On the other hand, the data I collected about hearing disabilities in Bolivia shows a similarly frightening side.

For my Introduction to Special Education class, I wrote my final paper on "Special Education for Students with Hearing Disabilities in Bolivia."  The statistics were appalling.

"Only 1.6% of persons with Disabling Hearing Impairment are included into educational or work productive settings and only 6% of the population living with a disability or learning difficulty are integrated in Bolivia." Source  (there was no date on the article, but a look at its references indicate that it was written at least after 2007)


In the case of congenital hearing loss, it would on average take 2 years and 4 months for the family to suspect it in their child, and the time between when children with hearing disabilities receive proper education and when the family suspects deafness is about 9 years and 2 months (reference found from previous source, but study was done in 2004).


According to a journal article published in 2011, based on the criteria of the existence of schools for deaf children, their bilingual/oral approach, acknowledgement of deaf children’s right to education, and assessment of literacy, Bolivia receiveed the lowest score of the Latin American countries surveyed (a 1 out of 5), and when Bolivia was scored on “the access to information, the mass media, and sign language interpreter services,” it received a 0 out of 5, the lowest score possible.  (Blume, Stuart, Donoso, Carla, Niño Natalia, and Rom Karina, Deaf Communities and the Cochlear Implant in Latin America: A Preliminary Inquiry, Culture and Disability International Network (CADIN), Ethnographica Journal on Culture and Disability, 1(1) 2011: 1-11)


So needless to say, it's a pretty dreary picture.  I can't actually imagine how bad it must be.  Like, how do you not have services for any of those who are deaf?  Well, perhaps it's easier than one would imagine for those who do not have this disability.  I went to UH's graduation today and the sign language interpreter was kinda like a cool add-on, but obviously not something that would be missed by us hearing people.


As I was writing my paper, I encountered this fact, "many deaf people in Latin America have not internalised the socio-cultural view of deafness and do not see themselves as members of a cultural and linguistic minority."  I found this idea and necessity of having a "deaf consciousness" fascinating.


For instance, one Mexican woman who was deaf, had been educated at Gallaudet University, a university for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington D.C. and who then returned home, found that as she interacted with those who were deaf, they preferred to refer to themselves as “hard of hearing” rather than “deaf.”  There was no pride in being “deaf” to them.  Although she wanted to empower them with all that she had learned from Gallaudet with the valuableness of their culture, she encountered staunch resistance from the deaf people in Mexico, and her views were seen as “alien, American, non-Mexican.”  In her own words, “I had to do a self-assessment because I had never envisioned myself as having American attitudes. . . . I had learned about empowerment from American deaf communities and from Gallaudet University.  Perhaps I was using approaches to encourage empowerment that might have felt oppressive to deaf Mexicans since deaf consciousness hadn’t been developed yet and the community hasn’t been exposed yet to empowered deaf people” (Blume, 2011).

Considering that Mexico was one of the few countries to receive a 5, the maximum score, on both of the previous assessments where Bolivia only received a 1 and a 0, one can only imagine how much more marginalized and less of a deaf consciousness those with hearing disabilities must have in Bolivia.