Autism: My way dealing with my autistic brother.

I have an autistic brother who is 8 years younger than me. For those who wonder what is "autism" *in malay, "lembam"*, as Wikipedia explained, it is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behaviour.

When my brother, Caswel was sent to a kindergarten and primary school in KK, he was mocked, discriminated, scolded, bullied and discouraged by almost everyone in the school. His kindergarten teacher even told my parents NOT to send him to school during Sports Day. It was hard to accept the fact that he isn't normal like other children and had to be put into a Special Class, but we did.

Good thing about Special Class is they help the special students to build up their confidence. With strong and stable self confidence, these special children are able to do anything like the normal children does. Now my brother, Caswel is able to sing and dance on stage with strong confidence, and I'm so proud of him.

When Caswel was just in primary school, we were told that he couldn't focus his attention to any lesson after 20 minutes. Hence came the advice to educate him academically not longer than 20 minutes. From this advice, my parents have been practicing the no-longer-than-20-minutes-lesson for years until now. This trend of teaching have somehow trained my brother psychologically that he couldn't absorb anything after the 20 minutes and he didn't.

My brother have a very good memory. He could remember things and movies he watched when he was just 5 and recap the whole story to us. That made me think, "If he can memorizes old movies, why can't History and Geography? I mean, he's an autistic not a mentally and physically handicapped. He's just a slow learner, not stupid."


So I sat him down in the living room with his History textbook. I asked him to read the whole chapter one, about how Japan invaded Malaya in the 40s. The first Q&A session was very disappointing, so as the second, third, fourth and fifth Q&A. About 45 minutes later, when I almost gave up telling him to read, understand AND memorize, he closes his textbook and began telling his story.

"Pada bulan Disember 1941, tentera Jepun mula memasuki Tanah Melayu di Alor Setar daripada Singora dan Pattani........ akhirnya berjaya menakluki Sabah setelah berjaya memasuki Sandakan daripada Miri pada Januari 1942"

See? I told him that he can do it and he did! It was very relieving for the both of us to be able to accomplish our goal that night and let him go to sleep with better confidence for tomorrow's lesson. Although I may sound a bit too pushy and rough at him during the teaching process, but it is important that I DIDN'T give him rough critics and rebukes that could condemn his confidence.

You and I HAVE to know that autistic children/people do not posses the same self confidence like ours. Their confidence is very fragile that if it breaks down, will causes GREAT DEPRESSION than the normal people usually feel. In worse cases, a depressed autistic people will lose control over themselves and behave out of rage and hurt everyone around them.

My final say for this post; be extra patient and always show confidence when educating autistic children. Show interest to whatever they say and let them know that you love and can be trusted by them. Autistic people have pure, clean and sincere heart and can be such a loving person once you get to know them. :)