Dream catcher project (2) – Normande Gaudreau

Here, read the transcript of the interview with Normande Gaudreau, a former president and member of the Cercle de Fermières Saint-Eustache.

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And I… I fell in love. It turned out that when I saw that kid, when I got there we weren’t… assigned, at the beginning, to a person. But I was drawn to the little blond guy. And I thought, “I’ve gotta work with him.” And that’s what I did, I worked with my little blond Julien… who was… special. And I discovered that a person with autism can… When you want to interact with them, you can’t touch them. So he said to me, “Ah!” Meaning, I’d touched him, because he was daydreaming. So I said, “Oh, I’m sorry!”

I said, “It’s not, I mustn’t do that.” He said to me, “No.” So then when he started daydreaming again, I’d knock on the table and say, “Hey, Julien, come back to me.” And he’d come back to me. And he made his dream catcher. At the last meeting we had, when we gave them their dream catchers, he came over to me and gave me a hug. So I’d developed something with a child with autism, you know. I was practically ready to adopt him. [laughter]