This centre for disabled children and adults needs gap year volunteers to provide
activities, such as art, music or dance. Physiotherapy, occupational therapy and art therapy is also
needed. Based on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.
Description of Project
This is run by the Mexican social services. Many of the Outreach International projects in Mexico,
including the children's refuge, orphanage and deaf school, are financed and supported by them. There
are 1800 registered individual children and adults on the programme who need help in a variety of
ways. This is help is provided in the form of:
Home visits and meal/food delivery.
Picking people up and taking them to a clinic in the town (you have your own driver).
Occupational and physiotherapy.
Art therapy.
Dance and music therapy.
These services are free to people who cannot afford them. The programme receives government
funding but disabled children and adults are tremendously disadvantaged in Mexico. Roads are cobbled, pavements
are non-existent, lifts are unheard of. Furthermore there is still a certain stigma attached to
being disabled.
Summary
Project Code: M6
Main Activity of Project: Working with disabled children and adults offering social support through therapies and
home visits.
Minimum Period of Stay: Three months.
Cost: Three months: £2965. For full details of our prices please see our costs page.
Articles / Volunteer Evaluations
We're having an absolutely brilliant time, totally in love with Mexico! Really
enjoying the disabled children's centre, we're there for 3 days a week. Yolanda's
great and the physios are lovely and very open to suggestions from us. We help out
with feeding and changing too when we've finished the physio. The other 2 days
we're at the clinic which we're really enjoying too. Again, the physios are really
keen to learn from us as well as teach us, and the doctor has asked that Pippa and
I set up a weekly teaching session for her and the physios so we're getting to
work on some presentations etc. Both places are much better equipped than we
thought they would be, and the physiotherapy at the clinic is really not that
different to what we do at home. Except the treatment that the patient requires is
dictated by the doctor. Although she is very open to suggestions from us about the
direction in which their treatment should go. We each have our own patient list
now which is good.
Everyone is so friendly and keen to involve us, one of the physios took us out
last weekend with her husband which was really fun. And Greta's been great. It
worked really well spending the first couple of weeks with Justina’s family. We've
stayed in touch with them and they invited us to Chimo for the weekend which was
really fun. But we are now grateful to have a permanant base, and the apartment's
great. We have a strict itinerary of places to go at weekends so that we make the
most of our time here.
This is a busy project and you would not have time to become involved in all the programmes listed
above. Dance therapy and art therapy classes run three afternoons a week and clinics are open
throughout the day for physiotherapy and occupational therapy. For the art and dance therapy you need
to have studied the subjects at school. Physiotherapists and occupational therapists need to be
qualified, but DIF would welcome anyone straight from college. You do not need to have any specific
qualifications to help with the home deliveries, helping individuals in their houses or to offer
support to many of the patients.
There are reasonably good facilities for all the programmes and you would work from a clinic or
community centre easily accessible to the patients. Some workshops are specifically for children,
others only for adults. The centres are based in a section of the town with little evidence of tourism
but totally part of the vibrant street life and close-living that is so characteristic of Mexico. No
special training is needed for working with the disabled children or adults, but qualified physiotherapists or occupational therapists are in particular
demand. If you are qualified, you would take a leading role in teaching basic therapies to non-qualified volunteers.
You could make a real difference – to others and yourself!
Outreach International need volunteers to work abroad in schools,
hospitals, orphanages, with the disabled, animals and animal rescue, wildlife, physiotherapy, medical projects, sports and on humanitarian and conservation projects in South America, Central America, Africa and Asia, including Ecuador, Mexico,
Costa Rica, Cambodia, Nepal, the Galapagos Islands, Kenya and Sri Lanka. We're always looking for Gap Year students or anyone who wants to take a career break, Summer holiday, Easter or Christmas vacation break or a few months or a year out volunteering
overseas.
