Rukoki School Music Therapy Work

I have been working as a Music Therapist at Rukoki Model Primary School for one term now.  I work together with a Ugandan woman (Maureen) whom I am training as a music counsellor.  We are running two music therapy groups (six children in each) and one integrated sing-sign choir with sixty singers.  One of the music therapy groups is made up of children between the ages of ten and fourteen who have learning difficulties such as autism and global delay.  The other group consists of children from the ages of ten to twenty-three (there is no upper age limit in the school since schooling sometimes gets delayed because of lack of school fees) and these children all have a hearing impairment, most of them completely deaf.  A charity came to town a few months ago to give hearing tests and free hearing aids to the children but there was no follow-up so the children are now not wearing their hearing aids because they are not accustomed to the noise they hear through it and have no help from professionals who know how they can decipher the noise or make it more bearable, so most of the children don’t wear them.

This term we have been working with the deaf children on a theme of how to deal with difficult emotions.  Some weeks a teacher is able to interpret for us, but some weeks we are left alone and we are picking up Ugandan sign-language very fast, but not fast enough!  You may wonder why we use music with deaf children, but there is so much more to music than sound!  We use drama, concentration games, imagination games and the vibrations of instruments make things move (the large wooden xylophone makes the insect-shaped shakers jump up and down the keys!)  We sign a song called “I’ve got a grumpy face” (Nordoff-Robbins Themes for Therapy) with a different emotion in each verse.  If the interpreter is there we then discuss how the children deal with the emotion in hand.  When talking of anger about being teased some of the children just pray and try to hide themselves away; others just cry; some confront the bully.  It is good for the children to share the fact that they are all coping with bullies and for them to share ways of dealing with these difficult situations.

One week I asked the children to think about the difficulties of being a teenager.  Being from the background I am from, I was expecting things such as “I really fancy this girl but she doesn’t notice me…” etc.  How naïve of me.  I was answered with a forty-five minute response signed by a seventeen year old boy and interpreted by his teacher.  His teacher was hearing this story for the first time, too, and she was equally as shocked by it as we were.  It spanned from when he was three years old when he could still hear, up to the present day.  It had in it episodes of witchcraft, enforced labour, family members beating and starving him, suicide attempts and eventually a happy ending where the boy is now in school reading, writing and having a positive time.  It was a good exercise because it means that the teachers are getting to know the children, since really all they know about the children they teach is their names and a bit about their special needs: there was one child whose name none of the teachers knew and the child could not answer for himself because of his disabilities!  They had to find a child in the school who came from the same village and knew his family so he could answer the question for him!  Apparently the child had reported for school by himself, sent by the parent, and nobody knew his name, his age or where he came from.

The work at Rukoki is an eye-opening experience and it is so enjoyable to work there.  Most of you will be surprised that Rukoki is a joy to work in because THEY KEEP TO TIME!  I have now had fourteen weeks of therapy with the two groups with no interruptions and no absences!  That is good going even in the UK!