A unique project offers children with special needs a lifeline and challenges the stigma, writes JODY CLARKEin Lusaka
GUIDED BY her teacher’s voice, Elana Phiri (11), is learning to write for the first time. In Braille. And with just one finger on each hand, the result of a rare genetic condition that has left her and an older sister with malformed arms and feet.
“I have to talk a lot, as she can’t see,” says Rozari Banda, taking Elana’s hand in hers, and punching dots that represent the letters A and B with a stylus into the Braille frame.
“But she is very intelligent, very keen to learn.”
Elana is one of 581 pupils at Bauleni Street Kids Project, a community school that sits at the edge of Bauleni Township in Lusaka, one of the Zambian capital’s poorest neighbourhoods.
Eighty-four of the students have special needs like Elana, and if it wasn’t for the project, many of them might have nowhere else to go.
“People with mental and physical disabilities, like in many African countries, face a lot of stigma in Zambia,” says Sr Mary Cathie Mac Innes, co-ordinator of the project.
“If the school wasn’t here they would just be sitting at home doing nothing.
“People don’t want to be seen with their children coming in. So they often don’t have anybody to take them here or anywhere else.”
Although the first schools for children with visual impairments in Zambia were established in the 1920s, children with disabilities in Zambia still have little access to education and training.
With most families struggling to live on less than $2 a day, resources are instead focused on able-bodied children.
As a result, only an estimated 2 per cent of disabled children in the country have access to any formal education.
Bauleni school, which is managed by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, has a class specially devoted to severely disabled children, but it is the only one of its kind in Lusaka. It has seven pupils.
For people with mental health problems, there is even less support. Public health financing, although relatively strong for programmes in areas such as HIV/AIDS and malaria are weak on issues of mental health, which attracts less than 1 per cent of the total public health budget.
In Ireland, it is 5.3 per cent (down from 6.7 per cent in 2009).
The lack of interest in mental health issues is mirrored across the rest of Africa. Among those African countries that actually have mental health policies, half have not changed them for 15 years or more and only a third have a policy that is less than 10 years old.
In Zambia, a new mental health policy was developed in 2005 but people who suffer from mental illness still face large-scale marginalisation in society, from the community level up to government. The Mental Health Act of 1959 is also known as the Imbecile Act, a term that campaigners say only serves to reinforce stigmatisation.
If someone is referred to as “mad” it is assumed that the whole family is, according to a recent study in the African Journal of Psychiatry, which found that mental disorders are “stigmatised”, “feared”, “marginalised” and “labelled in exclusively negative terms”. This forces people to keep quiet about mental illness in their families, to the point where they won’t allow their children to be seen in public.
And because families are afraid to speak up, the government doesn’t concentrate resources to the issue. No surprise then that mental health is regarded as the “Cinderella of the health services, as it is the last aspect of it”.
As a result, many sufferers are left open to abuse. Earlier this year Bauleni set up a hostel for young girls who have suffered sexual violence at home, a big problem in the country, says Sr Mac Innes.
“Children are lured away from their homes and often dumped in the area of the city that they don’t know,” she says.
“Even if they try to take a case to court, the judge will often say that the child is incapable of giving evidence.”
It makes the work of the volunteers and staff at Bauleni challenging. But as Ms Banda, Elena’s teacher says, even the smallest acts lead to progress. “Some of the pupils can’t talk, so we just try to show them love. Sometimes they need to be reminded that they are people just like everyone else.”
Jody Clarke travelled to Zambia with the assistance of Misean Cara, which supports the development work of Irish missionary organisations and part-funds the Bauleni project.