Gift of words
for kids with autism
By Edra L. Benedicto
Cebu Daily News

"BUTTERFLY."

It was the first complete word uttered by Monique and her parents were beyond overjoyed.
They were so overwhelmed and grateful that her whole family -- parents, two siblings and grandparents on both sides -- within the same day, trooped to the shrine of the Birhen sa Regla (Virgin of the Rule) in Lapu-Lapu City to thank the Blessed Virgin for an answered prayer.

Monique is no ordinary child. She was diagnosed to have autism spectrum disability when she was three. Her parents had almost given up hope that she would ever talk until Aug. 6 last year, when, at age five, she finally "emerged," as her father Roger Magtajas would put it, with that first word.
Monique, in many ways, is a very lucky child. Early diagnosis of her disability enabled her parents to give her the proper care and therapy.

Much of that they owed to the Responsive Education for Autistic Children (Reach) Center, run by a non-profit, non-stock foundation administered by parents of autistic children in Cebu.

Autism is an incapacitating lifelong developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life. It is the result of a neurological disorder that affects the functioning of the brain and stunts the child's normal development in the areas of social interaction and communication skills. Children and adults with autism typically have difficulty communicating, interacting socially with others and engaging in play activities.

Autism, the Reach Center stressed, is not curable but it is treatable especially if the child is diagnosed early and receives intervention early in life.

There is an estimated 99,000 to 138,000 Filipinos with autism but only about two percent have been diagnosed and only a measly half a percent of them are receiving appropriate intervention, according to data obtained from the Center.

Why have many children remained undiagnosed?

Dr. Jacqueline Jabonero-Espina, Cebu's only practicing developmental pediatrician, a specialist on children with disability, has some explanations.

Many parents, she said, do not know anything about autism because this is very little public awareness about the disability.

Parents also learned that getting their child diagnosed with autism was just the beginning of a long journey ahead. Where to go next to get help for their child is the bigger problem.

This was the dilemma that faced parents of autistic children. The absence of a "school" where children with autism could get the correct learning tools was what drove parents of six autistic children to put up their own center three years ago.

Couple Yumi and Sandra Espina recalled their desperation when the Cebu Learning Center, which had accepted autistic children, closed shop in March 2001.

They had nowhere else to enroll their three-year-old son. It was after a visit at the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) in Parañaque City that they came up with the decision to put up their own school.

With help from CARD, the Espinas and five other parents formed the Reach Foundation Inc. that gave birth to the school.

Reach Center opened in June 2001 as a one-room "school" equipped with only a few small plastic chairs and tables. From six students, it grew to 16 within in first year. Today after three years, the center attends to 65 autistic children crammed on the ground floor and sections of the second and third floors of the Espina-owned House of Architect Building along Juana Osmeña Extension, Cebu City. The building is used for free.

Much of the center's improvement was accomplished through the donations it had received from various donors. They came, saw the sorry state of the school and decided to give.

This was what happened to South Korean Harold Youngshik Shim, an officer of the Rotary Club of Seoul-Jeil, who after seeing the uphill battle that the foundation was doing to provide education for autistic children, went home and worked for a year to obtain donations from his own club in Seoul, South Korea and obtained a grant from Rotary International.

By the end of a year, he raised 28,000 dollars for the Reach Center, including the 14,000 dollars locally raised by the foundation through the Rotary Club of Cebu Fuente headed by Me'Ann Alcordo-Solomon.

It was mainly because of the donations of the Rotary Clubs that the Reach Center has, for the past two years, been able to offer scholarship programs to ten children with autism who belong to indigent families.

At present, the center has nine full time teaching staff composed of four occupational therapists, a psychologist and four special education teachers.

Most parents who have children studying at Reach, like the Espinas and Magtajas, are volunteers at the center.

Roger Magtajas, for example, gave up a high-paying job as a computer programmer in the United States to come home to help care for Monique. He now acts as the property administrator of the center while earning a living as a businessman.

The center's directress, Haidi Fajardo, is an architect who set aside a lucrative practice in favor of running the center.

The school principal, Carolina Pacaña, has a masters degree in special education and spent three years in the United States at the Los Angeles Unified District teaching children with autism. She could have easily landed a better paying job when she came home to Cebu last year but she chose to run the center instead for a fraction of what she could have earned elsewhere.

Yumi Espina, one of Cebu's sought after architects, doubles as the foundation's president.

To them, teachers and parents alike, its all about love and commitment. This, according to Magtajas, is the secret of why the Reach Center has succeeded in making the children in their care become functional.

They find joy in simple things that are taken for granted among "normal" children -- like having an autistic child finally responding to his/her own name, or getting him to finally hold a cup and drink from it.

Everything that the center earns from the monthly fees paid by its students are plowed back to the upkeep the school.

Despite their financial constraint, the center has been able to provide a daily teaching program using the "Fit" method -- functional integrated team approach -- that primarily addresses three developmental areas affected in autism: adaptation, communication and social skills. The students also receive intervention in other learning areas such as fine/gross motor skills, pre-academics and academic skills, and living and self-help skills.

Magtajas said it was the Fit program that was responsible for his daughter Monique's progress. Getting Monique to express her needs with words instead of by pointing at what she wanted was important. ``What will I do with my daughter who is so brilliant with calculus if she is not functional,'' Magtajas said.

The center also offers a home program for autistic children from other towns and provinces. The home program consists of five meetings where intervention methods.

As the student population grew, the center's administrators realized they needed a bigger space to house the school. A property in Mandaue City was offered to the foundation for a fraction of its actual cost. Using money both solicited and borrowed, a new school is now being built there, with a spacious yard and garden.

While the new school building had taken shape, there was nothing left to have it completed. It was then that Me'Ann Solomon, the most avid fundraiser for the center, came up with the idea of holding a benefit dinner show with the Reach Foundation as its beneficiary.

She recalled meeting Cebuano singer Chad Borja over a year ago. Last January, she gave him a call and asked if he would be willing to sing for the cause of autistic children.

Borja, she said, did not only readily agree to hold the concert for free, but also volunteered his service in the pre-production work that would ensure that the concert would be worth the 900 pesos per plate cost of watching the benefit show.

The concert, billed "Reach Out with Chad Borja," will be held at the grand ballroom of the Cebu City Marriott Hotel on March 19.

For Me'Ann, Haidi, Sandra and the other organizers of the concert, it is their hope that they will not only be able to raise enough money to complete the new Reach Center but also spread to a wider audience a better understanding of the challenges that children with autism face.

And, more important, to give children like Monique an opportunity to finally utter words like "butterfly."