When Haley Hintz and Dr. Myrabeth Bundy began working with the autistic community in Ecuador, they were surprised at how engaged the community already was.
But when they arrived in Tena and started working with the Kichwa community there, they found local clinicians and families had already built a strong network dedicated to supporting families.
“I think I was expecting to work with families and providers who had little understanding of autism and did not know how to support their children,” Bundy said. “But instead we found families who were not only strong advocates for their children but were also spending time and energy personally helping their children meet important independence goals.”
Nonetheless there was still plenty they could do to help.
“My mentor, Doctor Bundy, and I have gone to Ecuador twice now. Last year and then this spring,” Hintz, a LEND fellow, said. “Both times that we’ve gone, we’ve provided, training for the providers. Last year we were a little bit more assessment focused in our training…then this year, we did still provide autism and developmental evaluations, but we also were a little bit more intervention focused.”
That included donating assessment kits, intervention materials, and other kinds of aids as well as additional clinical guidance and advice.
“Each year we saw about 40 kids and their families,” Hintz said, adding that most of the children they worked with had already been diagnosed. “The families were really just wanting a developmental evaluation. So we were looking at things like their adaptive skills, cognitive skills, speech skills. And then we were able to provide to every family behavioral consultation. So talk with them about some strategies just to help the children have good quality of life. And they already had wonderful, happy quality of lives and really dedicated families.”
Often, the families traveled from quite a distance to ensure their children had the best care possible, sometimes even working through multiple layers of translation to ensure they could access the best information available. Bundy and Hintz found them incredibly curious and respected their initiative.
“They had looked up strategies on the internet, and they wanted all of the help that they could get,” Hintz said. “They were truly just so kind and loving towards their kids and just wanted them to have the best life that they could.”
The clinicians they worked with were often as dedicated as the families.
“They were truly some of the most dedicated providers,” Hintz said. “They had great knowledge of their patients. They asked us a lot of questions about their patients and how they could be helpful. They were so collaborative and they celebrated us and wanted us to be there.”
It was a lot of work, but Bundy an Hintz found it to be incredibly rewarding.
“Although the days were long and exhausting, the collaborative work Haley and I were able to do in Ecuador was some of the most meaningful in my career,” Bundy said. “Families, Ecuadorian therapeutic staff, and our Ecuadorian physician interpreters were interested in learning as much as possible about autism and seemed to innately see the value that autistic lives bring to their communities. And of course our biggest delight was to work directly with the children in these communities.”
