When my son Dodo was two and a half years old, he was still unable to talk, not even saying “Papa” or ”Mama”. Subsequently, he had been diagnosed with the developmental delay and belonging to the autism spectrum by the Child Assessment Centre (CAC).

My husband and I still remembered the situation right after we had taken back the assessment result of our son in the CAC, we were overwhelmed by loads of information relating Dodo’s need for training, a big heap of application forms, and a series of unintelligible messages… At that moment, we felt extremely perplexed and helpless, because we did not know how to choose the appropriate training for our son, nor how long should we wait until the suitable training that has been arranged by the relevant government department.

Anyway, we tried to send my son to some private speech therapy courses. However, all of those courses eventually proved to be useless. As Dodo’s parents, we kept crying deep in our hearts “Who can help our beloved child?”

We painstakingly searched for information on the web and made telephone enquiries. However, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, most regular training centres just replied “please fill in the form and wait for our notice”. After many a day of information seeking, we were exhausted … One day, a link “Positive Life Association Ltd.” (PLA), which bore no advertisement and no tag, appeared before our eyes… Thus we can stay connected with PLA’s educational psychologist Dr Jane Nam.

Dodo took the “Integrated Training Course” provided by PLA. Dr Nam indeed has rich knowledge and experience with the children. Most importantly, she thinks positively and can give us positive and professional information and advice. Dr Nam spared no effort to study and find out the reasons why Dodo could still not talk, thereby leading us to help improve his condition. The major crucial part was to train Dodo to use his oral muscles and tongue. After five sessions of the training, Dodo was able to clearly say words with meaning: “happy”, “ice cream” and “Daddy”.

Dodo needed my husband and me to accompany him in the first ten sessions of the training. In the eleventh session, he surprised us by showing willingness to attend Dr Nam’s training on his own. At the end of the session, as we were ready to take my son home, Dr Nam instructed him to say “Mama”, and at long last he managed to utter the word “Ma”! As a mother, I was overjoyed to hear and see the remarkable progress that my boy had made in learning to talk. We have been waiting for three years, and now we are so thankful to have the professional support of Dr Nam, thus my husband and I know how to improve Dodo’s condition. The efforts of Dr Nam together with my husband and I are justly rewarded.

We know that PLA is raising funds to build a kindergarten. We hope that more people will make their donation and join hands to build this meaningful kindergarten - to improve children with learning disabilities by means of hi-tech equipments. This kindergarten can bring new hope to children with learning disabilities, and thus stop leaving them to traditional teaching methods which would fetter and strangle their opportunities for improvement and meaningful growth.

With compliments from Dodo’s mother