The Saturday of 19th December 2020, Rwanda Down Syndrome Organization (RDSO) hosted its first self-advocacy session at its office. RDSO staff and volunteers welcomed guardians who brought the participants to the training and after registration, guardians would leave. Generally, we had a good turnout of self-advocacy group; there were 11 participants in total, all of them with Down syndrome except one participant who has a combination of Down syndrome and Tourette syndrome and was unable to follow most of the training due to his condition.
We started off with introducing the facilitators, Ms. Edwige and Pascaline and self-advocates took turns to introduce themselves and one person next to them to make it easy for them to remember each other’s names, but of course some self-advocates knew each other from prior encounters which made the exercise easier. We proceeded with establishing the rules of the training, with self-advocates having reference on how they usually behave in school to initiate the rules of the training. We moved our training outside on a terrace to briefly review preventive measures of COVID-19.
Once back inside, Pascaline introduced the topic of the day, “who do you want to be when you are older.” To take in the background of the self-advocates, they recited their age which proved to be challenging because they do not know how to count despite them having a range of 14 to 26 years of age. The facilitators talked through examples of things people do once they start working to set the stage of the topic and then divided self-advocates into two groups for them to discuss in depth on who they want to be when they grow older.
Each group with the assistance of a facilitator, they were nudged to think of who they want to be when they grow older and share with each other. It was hard for one group to come up with ideas, so the facilitator pulled up some examples with images from the internet which was helpful somehow. Self-advocates had time to practice telling others what their colleagues want to do when they grow older, and the task was repeated many times because of the challenge of their poor retention memory.
After the groupwork, self-advocates had a break in which they took refreshments and had time to stretch, learn a bit of the choreography of Jerusalema challenge, and play some football. Following the break, the groups presented their answers to the topic of what they want to do when they grow older and it was obvious that many of them needed help to remember what they had discussed in their respective groups. Next, self-advocates did an evaluation of the training, with many expressing how they liked the office, the people, and the activities they had done for the training; in fact, there was no negative feedback from self-advocates.
Lastly, self-advocates suggested activities that could be done in session 2, with many proposing to allocate some time to sing. It is even in that regards that some self-advocates sang some freestyle. The facilitators thanked self-advocates for their participation and attentiveness and ended the training.
By Pascaline Mugiraneza Munezero, volunteer at RDSO