BABA (GRANNY) program Baba Program is intended to provide small kids or such with disabilities with loving cares every day. Local retired women are hired to pay individual attention and give affection to two children, 3- 4 hours a day. The “grandmothers” cuddle them, tell them stories, go for a walk or bring them to their houses. After the bond between the babas/grannies and the children is established, the emotional development, speech skills, gross and fine motor skills of the children improve significantly. Thanks to the grannies’ cares the children’s physical and emotional health improves and they stand a better chance to be adopted or make it though the life.. Tabitha supports 17-20 babas in the social homes in Dren, Roman, Stara Zagora, Botevgrad, Pleven,Dupnica,Vratsa. The babas receive half a minimal wages for the country which is a great help to their meager pensions. The babas feel needed and useful, form a small social circle and socialize among themselves. Tabitha team monitors the grannies’ work and together with the director and the psychologist follows up on the progress of the children.
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Physiotherapy Several years ago we launched a health project in Pleven Medico-Social Home for babies and disabled kids (DMSGD Pleven). We hired a medical doctor – physiotherapist who regularly checks on the children, finds out acute problems and assigns therapies. Then she instructs and discusses the condition of every child with the physiotherapists and tells them how to proceed. We have hired on labor contract a few capable and enthusiastic physiotherapists who perform different treatments, massages and physiotherapy on the kids. Every child in the home gets daily attention and therapies and spends sometime with a physiotherapist thus improving his/her communication skills as well. We also donated some physio-therapeutic equipment. Recently a sensory room was set up for the kids in Pleven which helps the children relax their stiffness and aggressiveness or stimulate their mental and physical condition.
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Speech therapy Most of the children, abandoned at social institutions have speech problems as an occasional, consequential disturbance which accompanies their primary disease (i.e. mental retardation). Most of them had cognitive deficit and behavioral disorders and they need individual cares, tailored according to their type of speech disturbance. As a result of the regular speech therapies we have achieved improvement in the: - expressive speech (the mispronunciation and incorrect pronunciation of vowels have been mastered); - impressive speech (development of the phonemic hearing which is a specific direction in teaching initial literacy); - motor speech - the development of proper speech rate and rhythm, a real speech (diaphragmatic breathing); - motility - the development of gross and fine motor skills; - prosodies: the development of proper speech rhythm, intonation and stress; a real speech (diaphragmatic) breathing; - development of the general cognitive level (memory, attention, concentration); - improve reading technique and written skills (for the elder children);
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