The Sunday News
Robin Muchetu, Senior Reporter
A MOTHER’S love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all things that stand in its path, writes Argather Christie.
Her description of the mother’s love is apt. It defines the sacrifice that Mrs Isabel Mavengano from Bulawayo went through for her child. She is a mother of two and had an illustrious career in the hotel industry as a training and consultancy manager — a career which saw her travel the country and the world leaving indelible footprints in the tourism sector but she had to quit her job, to care for her then eight-year-old son after discovering he had dyslexia — a learning disorder that involves difficulties in reading, spelling, writing and even speaking for some people.
“After high school, I refused to take my parents’ profession — they were both teachers. I chose to enrol at the School of Hospitality and Tourism and I eventually worked in the hotel industry for 18 years with my last job being in one of Zimbabwe’s biggest hotel groups and this job made me travel a lot, opening new hotels in Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa,” said Mrs Mavengano.
She, however, discovered that her son had learning difficulties during homework sessions and this marked a radical redirection of her career and life in general.
“The school informed us that he was struggling to read, write, spell words and I could also see it at home while assisting him with his homework. But I could not figure out his problem. I could see an intelligent boy but I was wondering why he was struggling with school.
I had to make a very difficult decision at that point whether to continue with my blossoming career and travel around or to stop and be a full-time mother and focus on this boy. So, in 2010, I resigned, came back home and undertook a Post Graduate Diploma in Education for three years with Solusi University.
“At the same time, I was helping my son cope, I then also made another huge move to pull both my children out of school and home-schooled them from 2016. My daughter, on the other hand, did not have learning difficulties but I removed her from a formal school.
I was not working anymore and raising school fees was a challenge as my husband was also self-employed. I would sit at home and ask myself what I was really doing with the children, home schooling was something I had never done. But I soldiered on and completed my teaching course and started the journey of understanding my son’s condition,” she said.
Mrs Mavengano and her husband started to seek help and knowledge about dyslexia and were referred to an education psychologist who cemented their suspicions and were further referred to South Africa where they saw a therapist who diagnosed their son as dyslexic.
“We came back home with no idea how to deal with the condition. He went for remedial classes with a special needs teacher that we had been referred to but he attended for a short period. When he was 14 years old, he was only in Grade 6, yet he was supposed to be in Form Two. The tag he had been given was that he was a ‘slow learner’ but I could see that he wasn’t but because we lack understanding of the condition, we tend to call every child who learns differently a ‘slow learner’ yet that is not the case,” she said.
Dyslexia falls under neuropsychological conditions and for Mrs Mavenganos’ son, he cannot separate ‘b’ and ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’, sounds and spellings are a huge struggle but not a measure of his intelligence.
“I discovered my son was an auditory learner. If you give a person like him education in a book, you would not have done anything. We devised ways of getting information to him, via assistive technologies so we would put information on the computer and it would read for him.
“Sometimes he would speak into the computer and it would type answers for him. So, he then came to me and said he understood all I was teaching him and wanted to be in the same class with his agemates, which meant he had to jump from Grade Six to Form Three, he was 15 then and still home-schooling. I moved him. That was a huge risk,” added Mrs Mavengano.
During that period, she was home-schooling, a friend came with two girls who needed home-schooling as they also had learning difficulties.
“I converted my garage into a classroom to accommodate these children. I eventually registered a study centre, Africa Institute of Alternative Learning in 2018 as more and more children were coming through needing help. I then took a course in education therapy to help with silent learning difficulties like dyslexia and dyscalculia to name a few, having noticed that there were quite a number of children going through the education system, struggling simply because we do not have people who can assist them to learn,” she added.
When her son went to a formal private school in the city, they had to find him a scribe so that when other children are writing notes in class, the scribe takes the notes down for him as he cannot take notes himself. He was allowed to bring assistive devices to school so as to record notes and listen to them later. When he sat for examinations, he did that with an aid too.
“Examination time he would have a scribe and a reader with him which were provided by the British Council, to read the question and then scribe exactly what he would have said and I am glad to say he passed his 2020 Cambridge Examinations with five subjects, he failed one and now he is doing his Advanced Level,” she said proudly.
Mrs Mavengano highlighted that children with silent learning difficulties have a challenge that needed to understand before being dismissed as lazy to read and write or stubborn when in actual fact they are not. Some may even hate school because of their learning difficulties.
In the case of dyslexia, some children see letters in a book “jumping” up and down when they attempt to read, this is because what the eyes will be seeing and what the brain will be recording is completely different. Sometimes the children see letters transposing each other in a sentence and others feel like they are reading through a mirror. Many times, the children have attention deficit as they cannot tune out irrelevant noises around them so there is so much destruction in the brain.
“You have got to know that when dealing with a child like this, they need extra time to do things even in examinations. At home, you cannot send the child for seemingly easy tasks like going to the bedroom, getting tablets and fetching a glass of water at one go, they will remember one,” she added.
She advised parents to interact more with their children because they are the first line in disability identification. The school must just confirm what the parent would have picked up. She added that most children fail dismally not because they are not capable academically, but because they have learning difficulties which teachers may be too busy to notice or simply lack motivation to assist. — @NyembeziMu
