Raising Rio - Autism in Zambia

 

Meet four-year-old Rio Kale, he was about one and a half years old when his mother, Mercy, first started suspecting that he was on the Autism Spectrum. He is none verbal and can only get words like “mama”, “dada” and an occasional “no” out of his mouth.

Mercy described the experience of communicating with her son as “beautiful, because nobody else does it” saying Rio uses what is called “hand leading”, if it’s an item that he wants. Hand Leading is where he takes the adult’s had and directs it to the thing he wants, She says sometimes she deliberately touches the wrong items just to tease him and he does a “little celebratory dance” when she touches the right item and “When he’s crying these days, you know that he’s either sleepy or hungry, so you try those two before you try anything else”.

She notes that the difficult thing though is getting him to do things emphasizing that “it’s hard, it’s hard, and I’ve mentioned that, for him to take a command, it’s very hard.”

One way they get him to do things is by leading him and repeatedly saying the action being done, for him to remember but she says these experiences are not without regression saying,” it’s a lot of just signals and observation.”

Rio has not yet been officially diagnosed because of the high screening and therapy fees the family has encountered, but Mercy still hopes to get that done. She narrates that “I remember looking at the symptoms, and thinking how many of them checked out, and I was in denial. I cried, for like a week straight, because even I was like no, no no no no no, no...”

She created a checklist of signs and symptoms of Autism from the Centre for Disease control (CDC) website https://www.cdc.gov/autism/signs-symptoms/index.html and all the ten symptoms checked out.

“In the beginning it was about me, I was making it about me like oh my God, why is this happening to me…...but, eventually, I got around thinking, how’s my son being affected by this? He has to live with is, I have to just love him through it.”

She is a strong believer in a strong and available support system as this. she says is not easy to navigate alone, “have a partner who, even if it doesn’t work out with you, he/she’ll still be there for the child” she said with emphasis on how Jude, her husband, Rio’s father is fully present and loves their son.

She prays that her son only encounters people that will understand him and wants for him to understand the world enough to navigate it with minimal challenges.