Casey: The Speech Pathologist

July 8th, 2008 Piura, Peru

Casey: The Speech Pathologist

I think I may have mentioned that the infant in my house has trouble speaking. Pedro is now 2 years and 9 months old and still only speaks about 20 words max. The other child in our house is the same age and speaks like a 4 year old. Fortunately my friend Casey, a volunteer in the sierra, studied to be a speech pathologist in grad school and will be pursuing such a career when we returns to the States in December. So today my host sister met me and Casey in Piura with Pedro. We spent a few hours together so Casey could properly diagnose Pedro.
She said it could be aphasia which is the inability of the brain to produce or understand speech due to an injury or disease. She said he is way to young to diagnose this because some kids don´t start speaking until they are 3 ½ or 4. There are also many good signs: he understands almost everything, he uses lots of gestures and is very communicative in general, and sometimes uses 2 words together. So hopefully he is just taking a little longer to learn and will someday just explode with speech. My host family and family back home are both very thankful to Casey for being able to help us out.