We woke up Friday excited and ready to head to the diagnostic center! Well, to be honest, we woke up Friday like anyone would when they realize it’s actually only 4:30 AM- a little cranky and ready to find some coffee (or kaffi as they spell it here)! After we filled ourselves up with some homemade eggs and toast in our mini kitchens, we were excited and ready to find kaffi! Except we realized we were late… so we smiled through the sleep deprivation and headed to the lobby. We met two very friendly people in the lobby, with names it may take us a while to learn to pronounce. Icelandic names are so interesting and cool, but they seem to sound so much better when everyone else says them than when we make an attempt.
After meeting a man and woman from the centre (insert some very cool Icelandic names that we haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce, let alone spell, but we are trying!!), we got in their cars and discussed the language, politics, and how much we were looking forward to joining their crew for the week. We drove about ten minutes to a large diagnostic center. We climbed about 5 flights of stairs with no elevator in sight. It’s no wonder everyone here seems so fit.
We finally made it to the top floor and to our surprise, they had a fancy coffee maker that even had espresso! We were already filled with excitement about learning about the center, knowledge we want to share, an opportunity to learn, a chance to meet and collaborate with new people in a different culture.. All we needed was a little caffeine boost.. and here it was!! So now we were caffeinated and ready to go!
The room filled up with about 40 people and our professors, Lauren and Jackie, began their presentation on the importance of culturally competent care. During the interactive talk, we learned a lot about what is different between parenting and care in Iceland compared to the United States. We also learned that there has been a lot of immigration from Europe to Iceland, especially from Poland. We learned a lot about how they take into account the different cultures that make up their client base which is something we encounter often in our diverse city. We talked about strategies to make sure we all have a plan to help the families and children, while making it a priority to keep their cultural values at the center of that plan.
We broke into small groups to meet two adorable children at the center. A young girl was born premature and was currently receiving ABA services for feeding problems. She needed to gain weight and fast! The BCBAs had been able to use a behavior analytic approach to reduce her vomiting from ten to one time per day and she had gained some amount of kilograms. We aren’t sure how the metric system works, but they told us that it was about a pound! Our group hasn’t had a lot of experience with feeding programs, and it was cool to see an effective treatment that could potentially replace the need for a medical intervention.
The other cutie only had a few words, mama, papa, some speech sounds, and my personal favorite “nom nom nom” when she wanted to eat! We watched a manding session (fancy ABA talk for requesting for items she may be interested in to help teach more words) where the teacher played with her and paired words like “book” and “ball” with sign language and the vocal Icelandic word. Research shows that teaching sign language has improved vocal speech with children with disabilities. This session looked a lot more like what we do day to day in the states! The parents also stayed through the entire session for both children. Parent involvement seems very important here in Iceland!
After the morning session, we listened to some powerpoints about the diagnostic centre. We learned that they serve THE ENTIRE country! The population of Iceland is about 390,000 people and the number of kids that this centre helps is about 500. They have to travel through some serious weather conditions to help the kiddos out on the other side of Iceland. The people at the centre were so welcoming and excited to share everything they do with us. 4 BCBA’s work at the centre along with many other professionals. They use a multidisciplinary model and work together with speech therapists, occupational therapists, psychologists, and physical therapists. We can’t even imagine how hard everyone must work to make sure the kids have enough services!
We learned more about the assessments they use for each child and how the preschools here work. All children go to preschool anywhere from age 2-3! The preschools are organized by district. We learned about our placements for the coming week and what kind of cases we will get to help with. By the end of the day, we had learned so much about what ABA is like here in Iceland, and we are looking forward to Monday coming!
After we left the centre, we got our first taste of Icelandic living! We were finally adjusting to the time change and 24 hours of light so we decided to hit the town. We ate tacos (very Icelandic, we know. In our defense, we did have fish tacos..) and just to show how small Iceland was, we happened to be at the same restaurant the employees from the centre were at! We also got crepes and went dancing, before heading home from downtown Reykjavik. We slept through the light hours and then explored more of downtown. Laundromat was a great restaurant that knew how to do brunch.. eggs, bacon, pancakes, yogurt, salad, and bread all in one meal! Plus, they had some mean milkshakes. We caught the Poland football game in the square and drank a lot more kaffi. We also got to go up to the clock tower in a beautiful church and look out over all of the city. On Sunday, we went on a tour to see two waterfalls, a puffin (!!!!), a black sand beach with cool rock formations, and we got to stand on a glacier. It’s been a full and fun weekend, but we are so ready to get to work tomorrow!!
Thanks for reading and we will update you again soon! J
Love, Hannah, Julia, Riley, Ashley, Lizzy, and Greg
sounds like a wonderful adventure!
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