Roatan’s Beauty, Truth & Wisdom
CATTLEYA students and Elizabeth Peña, the director and math teacher.

Percentage of Islander Children with Disabilities Grows

Between October 30 and November 1, a Honduran ministry of Health “pediatric brigade” evaluated children with physical and mental disabilities from all over Roatan. The medical staff was seeing little patients with Autism, ADHD, language and motor skill issues. Dr. Hugo Soler, the Bay Islands Governor, coordinated the brigade’s visit.

Forty children were evaluated on the first day of the visit at the French Harbour’s Adventist Medical center, which currently serves as a temporary non-emergency facility after a fire destroyed the Roatan public hospital.

One of the caretakers who came on October 31 was Victoria Cabreras, from Flowers Bay. She brought in Ian, her 10 year old grandson, for the preliminary evaluation. Little Ian did not speak until he was six years, and communicates infrequently. “We’ll see what the doctors will say, and so that we can help him,” said Cabreras.

After three days, a total of 140 children had been attended to. However, many other children with disabilities did not come. In 2015, a government medical census team visited Roatan and registered 112 people with disabilities, including 25 children.

Parents don’t know where to go and don’t know where to turn.

According to Connie Silvestri, founder of CATTLEYA center for the disabled, the parents of disabled children are often afraid that the child might run onto the street and be injured by a passing vehicle. While some parents see this strategy as their only tool of how to keep their disabled child safe, often that is not what the child needs. “Ignorance is such a big issue. With ignorance comes abuse,” said Silvestri. “They [the disabled children] get beaten a lot. They get tied down, they get chained down.”

Repeatedly these parents don’t know where to go and don’t know where to turn. The disabled children are often misunderstood and suffer in silence. “The children can’t express what they are feeling and they can’t talk to anyone,” said Silvestri.

In 2012 Silvestri has launched CATTLEYA with a part time teacher and two volunteers. CATTLEYA which stands for “Con Amor, Trabajo y Terapia, Logramos Educar y Avanzar” -With Love, Work and Therapy we Educate and Advocate is an island NGO that has a school component called CEDICA – “Centro Educativo de Desarrollo Inclusivo Cattleya” (Educational Center for Inclusive Development) where children and adults come to receive specialized attention.

The NGO is located at the Jackson Memorial Library in French Harbour. CATTLEYA makes it by with what it has, and sometimes it is not much. CATTLEYA has several sponsors that help out – Max Cable provides free internet, Arcos gives free water, and Norman family has given the use of the building for the last eight years. “Our teachers are not really specialists. None of them are therapists, none of them,” said Silvestri. “My everyday worry is how much more we could be doing. We need to educate the educators.” The three CATTLEYA educators are taking online courses in psychology at UTH.

Mothers and grandmothers wait with children for an evaluation appointment at the Adventist Hospital.

CATTLEYA is taking care of 36 individuals with disabilities. The center is open from 7:30 am to 4:15 pm, five days a week. While the vast majority of them are children, some as young as four, there are also three adults in the program. To manage such a diverse group of students, the center takes care of their patients in developmental groups, with the biggest group having 13 children.

The children attending CATTLEYA suffer from a broad number of disabilities: autism, down syndrome, traumatic head injuries, and deafness. One disability dominates above all the rest, however. “More than half of the children here have autism,” says Elizabeth Peña, the director and math teacher at CATTLEYA.

According to Silvestri, there were no autistic kids on Roatan in the 1980s or 90s. Since Silvestri’s son was born with Down syndrome in the 1980s, she has been paying attention to families with special needs children on Roatan. Back then the island was relatively small, and the community living here was tight knit. The first known cases of autism on the island appeared in mid 2000s.

The origin and the frightening increase of autism rates was a taboo subject in the US, and in many ways in Honduras. In the 2024 United States presidential election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy for president brought badly needed attention to the issue of childhood vaccinations and autism. Kennedy has been nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services, and has shown documents linking the American health crisis to an explosion in required childhood vaccines.

Frightening increase of autism rates was a taboo subject in the US.

While only one in 1,000 US children in 1995 had autism, in 2024 that number has risen to 1 in 25 children. The official government stance in the United States and Honduras is that the causes of autism are a great mystery; there are powerful interest groups vested in not determining the cause of autism. The pharmaceutical industry is one of these groups. “We got all of these new vaccines, 72 shots, 16 vaccines… And that year, 1989, we saw an explosion in chronic disease in American children… ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy,” said Kennedy, who wants to test every vaccine to the same rigorous standard as drugs already are.

Autism rates increases are indeed astronomical, and California is a record holder in this tragic category. In the last 35 years, the autism rate in California has catapulted 4,300 percent. In 2020, according to Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, 1 in 22 California children have been identified to be on the autistic spectrum. California is also a national leader in childhood vaccinations.

The increase of autism has not only caused harm to children, it has caused destruction to entire families. “A lot of relationships end because one of the parents never accepted [their child’s disability], or didn’t want responsibility,” said Silvestri. “They abandon the family and leave to start a new life.”