KUDZAI MADYA- 23474084
ACTIVITY 8 - RESILIENCE
Resilience according to Nielsen (2007:46), is "the ability to persevere and adapt when things go awry, it is resilience is about bouncing back from adversities”. It is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences and the ability to rise above one’s circumstances.We learn to cope by coping; we learn to adapt by adapting to those things we cannot change. One of the people that actually represent resilience behavior is Helen Adams Keller
Helen showed positive adaption to perceived adversity. She was June 27, 1880 and died in June 1, 1968. According to Herrman (1998:117)Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. There was a woman called Sullivan who was trying to teach Keller the words and one of them was "mug" but Keller became so frustrated she broke the doll. Keller's big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.
After that Helen accepted that she was different and Starting in May, 1888, Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. All that she went through Helen succeeded despite being labelled unteachable and doomed to fail. She became an American author,...