Happy Haven

I was a bit nervous when I stepped out of the taxi when we arrived at Happy Haven School. Happy Haven is located on the outskirts of downtown Scarborough and is a school that is for students with disabilities, grades kindergarten through high school. While this sounds like a wide age range, the school has about 35 students and a total of 3 classrooms. In my last post, I talked about being anxious to do something meaningful here rather than lay on the beach all day and this was finally my much anticipated opportunity. Mondays are swim days so we took the kids swimming at the local Tobago YMCA, then come back to the school for break time, lunch time, garden time, and then lastly, class time. While the students were running around and playing on their break, I thought about how I don't have hardly any experience directly working with children with mental disabilities and at that moment, the splendor is this opportunity sunk in; I have the chance to work with these special kids in a completely different culture, learning from them as they learn from my culture. It started off slow but my first day there was fantastic. The kids started warming up to me and Erica, another student on the trip. Learning about the special education system here and after chatting with the principle, I learned that Tobago simply isn't ready to integrate special education classes into a general school. Tobago can be classified as a developing nation and have set a goal to be a fully developed nation by 2020 and hopefully by then, special needs children won't be so isolated. The goal of the school is to teach the kids basic skills that they need to function: social skills, communication, personal hygiene, cooking, etc. To do this, the teachers have their kids participate in a lot of hands-on activities. The kids there were absolutely precious! Usually special needs schools have a stigma of having children with a lot of behavioral problems but at Happy Haven, most of them just needed a little extra attention with developing basic skills. I've spent 2 days there so far and already it's been an awesome experience. The teachers sure do have their work cutout for them; when enrolled, many of the kids do not have an official doctors diagnosis and are usually picked out in preschool as a special needs students so teachers at Happy Haven only have their observations of symptoms to work from to help them develop appropriate skills. This surprised me because in the US, any form of disability services in the education system requires a doctors note. I've been learning a lot of valuable information about special education in general and how much it varies per culture. 

Today we spent the day doing rain forest hikes on different parts of the island. The rain forest was so lush with native palm trees, ferns, and vines (some that we swung on!). Fun fact: our tour guide told us that the largest wild animal in the rain forests around Tobago is the wild pig, ha! The second hike we did led to Argyle Falls, which had 3 waterfall tiers that cascaded into a deep pool. We spent some time swimming their and it was a perfect end to the day.