For this month’s featured
child, we are highlighting one of the children in our group home program,
Ji. Ji joined group home 6 in October of 2012. He was 6 years old at that time.
He was born with spina bifida.
Ji attends our Learning Center
and is a pretty smart boy! He enjoys drawing pictures, math class and writing
Chinese characters. He is a super talented artist - below is one of his
drawings of super heroes! He even knows a little bit of English and Italian.
And loves to show off his skills. If someone visits his home, he often starts a
basic conversation with them and checks if they too can speak English or
Italian!
Due to his spina bifida, Ji’s
legs are of different length and he has difficulty walking long distances. When
he joined his group home, he had special shoes to help correct the length of
his legs so he could walk. In January 2014, he had a surgery to correct
his hip problem. This surgery went smoothly and when he went back for his check
up, he was healing well. The surgeries are quite invasive and so he needed to
be on bed rest and was not able to attend school during this period.
By September, he started to walk
a little and do basic exercises by leaning on something or someone for support.
Unfortunately, soon after, he had a slight fall that resulted in his hip
joint breaking. And so, he went back to the hospital to redo the surgery. On
his return, he was once again on bed rest and could not really do much. But he
is slowly recovering from his fall and surgery. During his last checkup, he was
given permission to stand and sit. We hope he continues to have a speedy
recovery and can start going to school again early next year!