While Christ­mas is cus­tom­ar­i­ly a sea­son of giv­ing, for Team Hope, this oc­ca­sion turned out to be slight­ly dif­fer­ent.

The group's event last Sat­ur­day at Princess Eliz­a­beth Cen­tre was a spe­cial ex­pe­ri­ence not on­ly for the stu­dents and their fam­i­lies, but al­so for all of the mem­bers of Team Hope, a re­lease said.

Team Hope (How Or­di­nary Peo­ple do Ex­tra­or­di­nary things) is a com­mu­ni­ty based ad­vo­ca­cy and aware­ness pro­gramme of the T&T Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Ther­a­py As­so­ci­a­tion (TTO­TA). Sev­en­ty peo­ple have joined Team Hope to learn more about Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Ther­a­py, raise aware­ness for this much need­ed pro­fes­sion, ad­vo­cate for peo­ple of all abil­i­ties, fund-raise for the as­so­ci­a­tion and train for the Rain­bow Cup triathlon in June 2014.

The group's first aware­ness ini­tia­tive for the 2014 pro­gramme is with the stu­dents of the Princess Eliz­a­beth Cen­ter. Team Hope's co­or­di­na­tor and TTO­TA's Chair­man, Priya Gomes ex­plained in a re­lease, "The goal of the event was to bring cheer to the stu­dents through the use of fun ther­a­peu­tic ac­tiv­i­ties while al­low­ing the mem­bers of Team Hope to in­ter­act with the stu­dents and have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of their life ex­pe­ri­ences."

Oc­cu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pists, Jeanne Sab­ga-Aboud, Aliya Drakes and Stephanie Llanos led the ther­a­peu­tic ac­tiv­i­ties and along with the stu­dents, as­sist­ed them where need­ed. These ac­tiv­i­ties in­clud­ed mak­ing and dec­o­rat­ing a Christ­mas wreath and Christ­mas or­na­ments, which were all made from house­hold items like pa­per plates and corn starch. Their cre­ations were then dec­o­rat­ed with kite pa­per, glit­ter and home­made paint. These ac­tiv­i­ties al­lowed the stu­dents to fo­cus on their gross mo­tor skills (walk­ing, sit­ting up­right), fine mo­tor co-or­di­na­tion (writ­ing, grasp­ing, pinch­ing) and en­gaged their minds in cre­ative pro­cess­ing.

There was al­so face paint­ing, food and drink and an ap­pear­ance by San­ta with gifts for every­one.

"This event was not on­ly for the stu­dents and their fam­i­lies, but al­so for hopees to have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of what oc­cu­pa­tion­al ther­a­py is and how it is ben­e­fi­cial to peo­ple of all abil­i­ties," said Gomes.

"It is es­ti­mat­ed that 15 per cent of a pop­u­la­tion is deemed to have a dis­abil­i­ty, there­fore there are more than 195,000 peo­ple in T&T who could ben­e­fit from our ser­vices.

"How­ev­er with on­ly nine oc­cu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pists, many cit­i­zens do not have ac­cess to these spe­cialised ser­vices and un­for­tu­nate­ly there is on­ly one oc­cu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pist in the pub­lic sys­tem."

TTO­TA and Team Hope were high in praise of the staff and stu­dents of the Princess Eliz­a­beth Cen­tre, as well as for spon­sors Mario's, Had­co, Rit­u­als and Blue Wa­ters.

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