A child with special needs' amazing artwork-A Sketch to Remember
A few weeks ago, along with my friends from the United Arab Emirates, were invited by our common friend who happens to be a professor in Vietnam to drop by at his flat as he will cook lunch for us. How his simple gesture of preparing food for us can have a lasting impact and how he demonstrates his genuine desire to entertain us is something that will surely be treasured in our hearts.
Aside from cooking for us, he gave us a tour of his small and cozy bedroom. Upon entering, you would instantly feel the positive energy. Bedroom lighting design, choice of bed sheet, pillow shams arrangement, fur mat beside the bed plus the lighted scented candles and its rejuvenating scent made his bedroom to look and feel magazine worthy.
After a small chat, he showed us some sketches of his face given as a gift by either his friends or students.
Suddenly, the room got quiet as we stared intently at the sketch which for us looks like a distorted face of our friend. Soon after, the three of us uttered a synchronized reaction,* “Definitely the sketch doesn’t look like you!” Then he began to tell the brief story behind the sketch. “That is you!, my student insisted.” As he ended telling the brief story, our friend turned the sketch upside down for us to witness the splendid change and to our amusement, the sketch is indeed the face of our friend….
“It was my student with special needs who gave me this sketch as a gift”, he said.
“When this was handed to me, my reaction was…..definitely, this is not me!”* he added.
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“I looked at the sketch again. I still couldn’t find my resemblance.”
“He reiterated to me, That is you!”
“You just have to turn the sketch upside down, my student revealed.”
“Sometimes, you need to look at things from a different perspective, my student said in a most enlightening manner.”
The sketch is not just as simple as it may seem at the first glance…… truly, it is remarkable… “a sketch to remember” . The concept strongly conveys a message to change someone’s way of thinking about disability, people who have special needs and people with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
For all we know, they have the eyes that can see things from a different perspective…..a beautiful perspective seen by them in an extraordinary way. In most cases, you will find brilliance in what they can actually do. I hope this will encourage us to put in some efforts to dig deeper and reach out with the people who are not just in need of basic necessities but also people with special needs. They are not evil, not crazy, not possessed, not sick nor a freak. They are simply human beings like us. Yes, they have their own world too that if we make our selves be aware of how we should respect their being, we too will be able to see and appreciate the beauty of how they see their world that other normal people sneer and see as opposite.
Please share and make a difference to someone’s life.