Dinner with the President!

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Our team has been warmly welcomed in the Maldives. We have been treated with the utmost care and respect and we feel so grateful to be here! Just when we thought we couldn't feel more honored, we were invited to have dinner with the President at the presidential palace. We were informed that we are the first group that has been brought inside the palace by the current president! We truly felt very special. We spoke for a long while with the President and his wife, Madame Ilham, about the mission of Knowledge for People and how our training here is helping their country.

The following day we continued our training. The 35 teachers and 20 parents have been working so hard with us. Eight days of training for 6 hours each day is not easy to go through and they have been engaged the entire time. Some of our team members commented that this group has learned the information quicker than any other group of adults who have gone through the training. We are so proud of our Maldivian friends!

Our training is proving to be extremely meaningful. We have received an incredible amount of positive feedback. In fact, one of the parents went home after a day of training and applied a strategy with her son that she learned from Lizzy. She said it was like a miracle! Her son responded right away 😊 She said that the training she is receiving from our Knowledge for People team has taken away much of the stress that she has been feeling since her son was born 7 years ago. Hearing things like this makes all of our hard work very worth it!!

In addition to receiving positive feedback from parents, we have found that training the teachers is going to be helping many, many children. Not only will it be benefiting the students who have autism, but also their classmates and the teachers themselves! One teacher reported that she has a new student coming to her class soon who has autism. She said she would have had no idea how to help him to learn had she not had these trainings. We have heard from some of the parents who we worked with at the Maldives Autism Association (MAA) that their children get sent home from school every single day because the teachers have not been trained about autism. That is the thing with autism. Children with autism CAN learn, but they learn differently from the rest of us. They must be taught in a specific way in order to see the most possible progress. It's not anyone's fault if they don't know how to teach a child with autism...they just need to be trained!

We worked with 25 children and their parents at MAA. All of these children are on the waiting list and currently receive NO services. There aren't any other services available in the Maldives and the MAA is at maximum capacity serving 30 children currently with 2 sessions--one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We just found out that the waiting list went from 34 families to 54 just since we arrived 2 weeks ago! They need more space and are hoping to receive a piece of land from the government in order to build a proper center. They are also in desperate need of more funding.

Today is our last training day and we are sad to leave. We will miss our new friends so much! We are confident that they will efficiently and effectively implement the training they received. We are already excited to come back next year 😊

We also were able to enjoy 2 days off at the Bandos Island Resort. We highly recommend it!!! We snorkeled and some people dove and we did photo shoots on the beach 😊 Keep scrolling down for more photos!

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Photos

Beautiful Liz!
Beautiful Liz!