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.
