I thought you might like this picture of one of our CP children's language lesson. Julia our speech therapist is looking at the camera. The person sitting on a chair in front of Chidi is Pia, a Swedish VSO who works in a special school in Abuja and came for what VSO calls a "Skills Sharing Visit". Chidi is using Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) and doing beautifully. Only he cried when he couldn't make a sound out of the recorder, but cheered up when Julia brought the bubbles out for him to blow instead.

Seventeen Open Doors students have just returned from Lagos where we competed in the National Special Olympics competition last week. We are happy to report that we won 7 Gold Medals and that two of our Gold medal winners were selected by ballot to be part of the Nigerian contingent at the World Special Olympics games in China in 2007. We will post photos from the competition very soon.

On April 6th Open Doors welcomed para-Olympian Vitalis Lanshima and his wife Beth. Vitalis Lanshima had just arrived from the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne where he won a bronze medal for Nigeria in the 200 metre dash. The visit was an inspiration to Open Doors to Athletes to train even harder so they can win medals for Nigeria in international competitions, just like Vitalis did.

April 2006
The North Central Regional Special Olympics Competition was a grand success. More than 100 athletes, from Jos, Abuja and Minna participated. Open Doors won the 5-a-side soccer match, so the entire Open Doors team will be among the 17 Open Doors athletes ti take part in the National Competition. In addition, Open Doors athletes will compete in running and standing long jump, 100 metre walk and 100 meter run as well as in table tennis. The National Competition will hold in Lagos in mid-June. At this competition 20 athletes will be selected to represent Nigeria at the World Competition in China in 2007.
Our Special Olympics contingent leaves for Lagos just one month from today for the national competition, so everyone is excited about that.

We have just partitioned one room where we will now have the children come for speech and language therapy using recently donated computer.