Mohammad is 7 years old and has cerebral palsy. His paternal grandparents were affected by methyl isocyanate gas during the 1984 Union carbide disaster. Mohammad has been attending the Chingari children’s clinic since 2019, when he was just 21 months old. He was a premature baby and suffers from muscle tightness in all his limbs and a scissoring pattern in his legs, which prevented him learning to sit, stand or walk. The physiotherapists have been working with him to help relieve the muscle tension, and Mohammad has now gained control of his neck movement, improved the function of his hands, and learned to sit independently.
When he came to Chingari, Mohammad had not yet started to talk. With the help of speech therapy, he has learned to speak and communicate well with his parents and teachers. Mohammad has made enormous progress in his education classes over the past few years. To begin with he was withdrawn and had trouble communicating, but his social confidence has increased over time. He now greets the teacher and his classmates and is happy to share and play with the other children. He has learned the alphabet in Hindi and English and is working on his writing. He has learned some poems by heart and can recite them in class. With the help of the occupational therapist, he can now eat and drink with his hands without help, and he picks out his own clothes in the morning and choice of food at lunchtime.
Mohammad enjoys listening to music, especially dance music. He also listens to Qawwalis (a form of devotional Islamic music that originated in Persia and is performed by Sufis). He loves pens and likes to buy new ones when he can and uses them to draw in his notebooks. He wants to become a doctor and likes to put his brother’s school identity card around his neck and tell his mother ‘I’m the doctor and you must take half a tablet in the morning and half in the evening.’
