Naughty battler a shining example
When he was nine months old, Sean Cheung Kar-tung could not even lift his head off the pillow and his parents knew there was something still terribly wrong with their prematurely born son.
'He was born early, at just 26 weeks,' his mother, Mable Lam Man-kit, 41, said. 'He was just 1.1kg at birth and very tiny and too weak. His lungs weren't functioning, nor his heart vessels. There were so many things wrong with him. We had no information and were at a loss. The doctors initially said he was taking so long to develop because he was so premature.'
After a nightmarish couple of years involving weekly visits to specialists and a three-month stay in Guangzhou to try acupuncture, Sean was finally diagnosed with cerebral palsy and referred to the Spastics Association of Hong Kong. Next month, he will celebrate his fourth birthday. He's talkative - and naughty - and smiles and gives a shy 'good morning' when he meets new people. He's learned to sit, can grip with his hands and feed himself.
Sean's remarkable progress is thanks to conductive education, a system devised by the Peto Institute in Hungary, which takes a holistic approach by fostering the development of a subject's mind as well as body.
The Spastics Association has devised a Hong Kong model of the training.
Operation Santa Claus, co-organised by RTHK and the South China Morning Post, is helping the Spastics Association by raising money for scholarships to train more staff to learn about conductive education.
Clare Cheng Yuk-kwan trained as a therapist and became a specialist in the method.
'If we have support from Operation Santa Claus, we can educate more trainers and have more manpower so we can build interpersonal relationships with each child and work through their temperament,' she said. 'We believe that every child can learn.'
The association is looking for $160,000 from Operation Santa Claus to train 100 special education and rehabilitation personnel at the Teaching Unit of the Jockey Club Marion Fang Conductive Learning Centre in Lok Fu. The training would benefit 400 to 600 children with disabilities.
Half of the money would be used for a training course at the centre, the other half to train 16 personnel for long-term development of conductive education at four to six institutes across Hong Kong.
