We have a good number of various types of disabled people in our society. If they are properly trained, they can substantially contribute instead of becoming burden to others. In developed and developing countries, Government takes the responsibility for training and rehabilitating these people. In Bangladesh, our Government has also taken many measures of this kind but those are not enough. To multiply the effort, like many other countries, there are some organizations established and run by the parents and guardians of disabled people.
Autism is a kind of disability usually identified in children at the age between 18 months to 3 years. The affected children suffer from mainly 3 difficulties. These are: Verbal or non verbal communication, Impaired social inter-action and limited activities/interest with rigidity in thinking and repetitive behaviour. These children may improve and live a close to normal life if appropriate intervention and proper training is imparted in time. Though we have many organizations in Bangladesh working with various fields of disability but there is hardly any quality institute developed exclusively for the autistic children.
The problem further aggravated with the unavailability of any training centre to train trainers or teachers to work with autistic children. Similarly, there is no facility available for the training or motivation of parents or caregivers of autistic children. We neither have any centre for caring a child for the whole day nor do we have any residential training facility. The dream of rehabilitation is not yet even thought off.
At this backdrop, we, the parents of some autistic children started the ‘Autistic Children’s Welfare Foundation, Bangladesh’. The foundation is purely a non profitable parent run organization, established exclusively for the welfare of the autistic children.
