Abstract
Caring for children with special needs is especially difficult in areas of economic impoverishment. Cultural norms, combined with a significant lack of resources, often push families and individuals with special needs to the margins, where it is hard for them to be seen or heard. This chapter describes the work of a developmental psychologist who travels twice yearly to jungle communities in Guyana. Her specialty is working with people in their home environments, assessing their needs and offering suggestions on how to cope not only with the disability of the child in their family, but with the multiple stressors on the family system that often accompany the diagnosis of a disability, including poverty, scarce resources, and social isolation.
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Notes
- 1.
U.S. Department of State, “Guyana”. http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/gy. Accessed February 5, 2015.
- 2.
Death of a Salesman, Act I, Scene 8.
- 3.
As a reminder, the fivefold process asks that one (1) pay attention to silence; (2) experience attention: bring it to consciousness; (3) analyze the silence through full engagement; (4) inscribe silence onto one’s own thinking; and (5) consciously act on the basis of this reflective process.
References
Abrams, Ovid. 1998. Metegee: The History and Culture of Guyana. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Eldorado Publishing.
Carlson, V. J. and Harwood, R. L. 2014. “Precursors of Attachment Security: Behavioral Systems and Culture.” In Hiltrud Otto and Heidi Keller (Eds.) Different Faces of Attachment: Cultural Variations of a Universal Human Need. New York: Cambridge University Press, 278–303.
Miller, Arthur. 1973. Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking Press.
U.S. Department of State. (Guyana.) http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/gy. Accessed February 5, 2015.
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Billias, N., Vemuri, S. (2017). The Silence of the Unknown and the Unknowable (Guyana). In: The Ethics of Silence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50382-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50382-0_5
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