By Natalie Clark
At 2 a.m. they stepped off the plane to find a world they never knew before. Surrounded by signs in Arabic and guards armed with guns, the two BYU graduate students struggled to find something familiar.
?I went over a little scared,? Mullins said. ?Once we got to the hotel and went sight seeing, it seemed normal.?
Students Lisa Mullins, a second year speech-language pathology graduate student, and Michelle Nishida went to Syria for a week in September to help run the ?Train the Trainer? program with the Special Olympics.
The program teaches health professionals and student volunteers how to examine different areas of Special Olympic athletes? health and improve their ability to compete. There are six sections: Opening Eyes, Special Smiles, Healthy Hearing, FUNfitness, Health Promotion and Fit Feet.
While there, Mullins and Nishida worked with David McPherson, chairman of BYU?s Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology.
?We accomplished a lot more than was anticipated,? McPherson said. ?The training which Lisa and Michelle received is probably unparalleled for graduate students anywhere.?
McPherson is also the global clinical director for the Special Olympics and served as a mentor to the volunteers, an opportunity Mullins and Nishida said they didn?t want to pass up.
In Syria, Mullins and Nishida taught professionals at the new Aamal Center in Damascus to become clinical directors in their own countries. This training included teaching how to operate screening devices and giving hearing tests to children.
?I absolutely loved it,? said Nishida, a graduate student in speech-language pathology. ?I felt like it was a valuable experience in a lot of different ways ? both culturally and educationally. Educationally, I saw how professionals in my field were prepared, or unprepared, in certain areas to help these children.?
A lot of the children have intellectual disabilities like Down syndrome, autism or similar syndromes. Mullins said there is a lot of good to do for them.
While working with the children, Mullins said she learned to be very inviting, not to over stimulate the kids and to use a digital camera a lot.
?It sounds kind of funny, but Michelle and I would go around and take pictures of the kids,? Mullins said. ?As we would do it, we would show them the picture on the digital camera, and it really helped put them at ease.?
Since Mullins and Nishida did not speak Arabic, a translator helped them communicate with both the children and the professionals.
?At times it was hard with the language barrier, especially when we were doing training,? Mullins said. ?For those translators who are not well versed in our lingo it was difficult because they would translate from English to Arabic or French and meaning would get lost in the translation.?
Mullins said she is grateful for the experiences she had working on the weeklong project and the people she met.
?They are wonderful people and children of our Heavenly Father,? Mullins said. ?They are all good people.?