WELCOME ON the SITE Of the SOFIBA fondation

Here is the SOFIBA's website; Where you can interact with us . Do not hesitate to register as member of the site and to give us your remarks and ideas . Even a criticism can help us to go forward. We wish with this site, to allow everyone to add its contribution in our project; in order to build for the mentally handicapped persons of Senegal, a better environment.

CURRENT SITUATION in Senegal:
The people suffering from mental deficiency in Senegal very often find themselves isolated, and misunderstood. Being a heavy burden for their family who already has to face the daily difficulties, it is not rare to see them, abandoned , even homeless and hanging in the streets where they are then treated like the "insanes",or "freaks"; when they are not the subject of mocking sometimes one launches stones to them, and as for the girls, they are often violated or deceived....
These actions as negative as they can be, cause to worsen the mental state of these people who on the contrary need attention, sometimes affection, in any case human consideration to help them to develop.
In Senegal the mental state of those suffering of deficiency seems to be perceived (wrongly) like a fate.
First SOFIBA wants to make senegalese people aware that the mental state of a person can improve if an adapted care is taken to him.

However, with poor ressources, specialized centers manage to exist :

Keur Khaleyi right in the Fann Hospital of Dakar
Centre Aminata Mbaye with ASEDEME
"a handicapped person is a person with whole share, at the same time ordinary and singular. She is ordinary, because she knows the needs for all, she has the rights of all and she achieves the duties of all. She is singular, because she is confronted with more difficulties than the other citizens, and who are the consequence of one or more deficiencies. Thus, the mental handicap results in more or less important difficulties of reflexion, conceptualization, communication and decisions. These difficulties must be compensated by a human, permanent and evolutionary accompaniment, adapted to the state and the situation of the person "

The MENTAL handicap: (ref.: unapei)
"These handicaps bear various names: trisomy, autism, polyhandicaps, X-Fragile... If pathologies sources of mental handicap are varied and more or less handicapping, all the people who suffer from it have common points. The first of them is undoubtedly the need for an accompaniment personalized in order to enable them to progress towards the most possible autonomy.
Which are the consequences of this deficiency for the mental handicapped person?
Concretely, a person in situation of mental handicap can, because of her deficiency, have difficulties :
•to memorize oral and sound information;
•to fix its attention;
•to appreciate the importance relative of information to provision;
•to evaluate the flow of time;
•to locate itself in space (difficulty of using the plans or charts);
•to appreciate the value of the money;
•to mobilize or remobiliser its energy;
•to know: immediate or widened environment; the tacit agreements which govern the exchange of information; modes of uses of the equipment, devices and automats placed at the disposal; rules of communication and vocabulary. That can also result in an insufficient control of the reading and/or writing even if the handicapped person acquired the basic knowledge: words (difficulty of deciphering the logos for example); figures (difficulty in calculation and logical reasoning); hour (in particular in numerical form). More generally, any disturbance can be enormously destabilizing (effect of panic, of tagging along, resignation: the person will remain on the spot, sometimes during hours)".

According to the CIH (International Classification of the Handicaps) : "Disturbances of the degree of development of the cognitive functions such as perception, the attention, the memory and the thought like their deterioration following a pathological process". Moreover, the CIH prefers to rather use the terms of "Intellectual Deficiency" for this definition, instead of "Mental Handicap".

According to WHO (the World Health Organization) : "handicapped that is called of which integrity physical or mental gradually or is definitively decreased, either congenitally, or under the effect of the age, a disease or an accident, so that its autonomy, its aptitude to attend the school or to occupy an employment are some compromised".
Difference between mental handicap and psychosis
"If one refers to the definition quoted above by the CIH for example, the mental handicap is a deficiency of the intelligence, a disturbance of the degree of development of the cognitive functions.
The mental patient does not have a intellectual deficiency inevitably. He can have a very high intelligence quotient, even largely above the average. The aspect "psychosis" will appear like a passing or constant disorder in its mode of behavior. It is looked after rather in psychiatric hospital or using drugs having an influence on the psychic state of the patient. Moreover, these disorders being able to be momentary, a healthy person can perfectly develop a psychosis at one period of her life then to cure without after-effects. Conversely, a mental handicap is very seldom curable ".

The UNAPEI gives this definition besides: "the mental sick person is marked by a disturbance of her mental faculties which can be cured or reduced by means of an adapted therapy".