In part 1, Paul Calvert spoke with Kalman Samuels, the co-founder of Shalva, about his son Yossi's injury, and how that led to the founding of the most advanced centre in Israel for people with disabilities.



Continued from page 1

We were in New York for five years trying to help him.

Transforming The Lives Of Children With Disabilities And Their
Families In Israel

I went into the computer field while there and well-meaning people would sometimes come to my wife for a visit and say, "Poor Malki, trying to deal with this child." Then would at the end of the conversation suggest that you must get this child out of the house, you cannot go on living this way.

At night Malki would cry and when she cried she would always say, "God I am not putting Yossi out of the house. I am going to keep him as long as I am alive. I can only promise you this, that if you ever decide to help my Yossi, I am going to dedicate my life to helping other mothers dealing with similar issues of their own." So I used to hear this.

We came back to Israel five years later. I went into the computer field here and we had a family of six children, Yossi being number two. We enrolled him in the deaf school, and in the deaf school there was an extraordinary teacher. She was deaf herself and she sat him next to a table and put one palm on the table and in the other palm she spelled the Hebrew symbols for the five letters that spelled the word table in Hebrew, which is Shulhan.

After I don't know how long, a day, two days, or three days, she suddenly noticed that he had a broad smile from ear to ear. She had the smarts to know that he just had a break through to communication. Very similar to the famous Helen Keller, blind and deaf, it was with her the word 'water' at a similar age, with him it was the word table and Yossi was off to the races.

He learned the 22 letters of the Hebrew ABC. He learned how to sign and to understand that this was called a table, and this was called a chair etc.

Transforming The Lives Of Children With Disabilities And Their
Families In Israel

On the basis of that work an amazing young speech therapist crawled into his mouth for two years and taught him how to speak Hebrew.

So now you have a child you can speak to by spelling in the palm of his hand very easily. Twenty two letters is not hard to learn. He can speak back with sign, but more importantly he can speak. Now granted he did speak with a cockney accent, which you had to get used to, but once you got the accent, you begin to understand the language.

Yossi became very well known. He became known as the Helen Keller of Israel. He was hosted by the President of Israel and he was later hosted by many other famous people, including the President of the United States, George Bush.

He became a wine taster, rides horses, and right after this breakthrough, Malki sat me down and said "It's payback time. I made a promise. I know exactly what I want to do to help people and I need your help."

I was only to game to try and help her, but I realised that it required money. It took me three years until I finally found a dear friend in Vancouver who would give us seed money to start renting an apartment and hiring two staff, and beginning to open one after school programme.

Transforming The Lives Of Children With Disabilities And Their
Families In Israel

The goal initially was to lengthen the day of parents. When a child goes to special needs school, in Israel or anywhere else, certainly in those days, school was over for youngsters of six, seven or eight, probably by 1pm, or 2pm in the afternoon. A little bit older it might have been 3pm, but the day wasn't full.

When that child came home, we knew that mummy was absolutely taken. She has other children, and the siblings don't have time to see mummy, because she is busy with the child with disabilities and rightly so. She certainly can't work full time. The bottom line is there is no question, there is a serious challenge here for that family.

So the first programme was to extend the day from 1pm to 6pm.