Built on solid foundations

As one of the very small band of people who helped Josie Muscat create the Eden Foundation, I can well understand his frustration at the news of its loss of identity.

Dr Muscat, a man of action if ever there was one, changed the face of disability in Malta. For 10 years we, his collaborators, worked without respite, with hardly any time off, with no weekends to speak of, working late into the night, day after day, to set up a cutting edge organisation that would finally redress the situation of persons with intellectual disabilities.

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, Eden managed to persuade the ministry and the department of education to make inclusion the official policy. Until then, all children with disability were automatically shunted into special schools. Slowly, Eden persuaded a doubtful MUT and a reluctant teaching profession not only to look upon children with disability as citizens deserving equal rights and treatment but to accept into their classrooms the presence of the facilitator, initially a threatening figure considered to constitute a permanent inspection of the teachers' abilities. The breakthrough came when a number of Church schools accepted to experiment with inclusion. Its success made it easier for the Education Division to take it on.

The first facilitators were recruited and trained and paid for by the Eden Foundation and proved to be a tremendous drain on its resources. Hand in hand with this struggle was the parallel one to persuade the Education Division to take facilitators seriously and provide them with a University qualification. This entailed a long process of negotiation with both the department and the MUT as to what salary scale this new grade was entitled to.

Another first for the Eden Foundation was the assessment of all children with disability attending government schools to find out whether they needed a facilitator or not.

The Education Division then lacked the structure, now in place, for the necessary assessment. Once again, Eden decided that the best way to persuade the division was to show how it could be done. The financial cost, and the drain on Eden's professional resources, was tremendous. But this battle was won too. Children with autism were completely neglected. Hardly anybody on the island understood this painful disability and few, if at all, knew how to support such persons.

The foundation managed to link up with the National Autistic Society of the UK, which sent experts to Malta to train Eden staff and monitor the programme on an on-going basis.

Autism still remains perhaps the greatest problem to deal with in class but Eden staff did a wonderful job in going round government schools - when they were allowed to do so - to explain how these children could be supported. It is not easy to describe the prejudices that had to be overcome as well as the hostility from quarters where one might have, with justification, expected help.

The third great battle was to show that people with intellectual disabilities were capable of employment. Until the advent of the Eden Foundation, these relied on a state pension that left them either vegetating at home or else warming a chair in a government department's corridor where they passed their days doing nothing. I can remember the present Prime Minister, then chairman of the National Commission for Person with Disability, admitting he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw Eden's young men and women enjoying gainful employment. As one of those who had helped the foundation, this was a real joy to him.

To train staff for this programme Eden had initially to engage the services of foreign experts as Malta was almost totally lacking in any real expertise when it came to training people with mental disability to apply for and hold down jobs in the open market.

All this took a great toll on all staff and it was only the driving energy and the total belief of Dr Muscat in his mission that made all this happen. I personally never had any doubts that the Eden Foundation would find it extremely difficult to replace a man who guided it and lived it on a 24x7 basis. To a large extent the Eden Foundation has been the victim of its own success. That it also may have failed to replace the broad shoulders of Dr Muscat is an understandable human failing.

I wish Eden well in its new venture.