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36.

Timothy Morahan

I am Timothy Morahan. My father retired from DFAT in 2012. His

last posting was to Romania, I joined my parents there, when I was

22. That sounds not unusual. Except that I have autism and a

learning disability.

In Bucharest I went in the mornings to a small training facility for

people with learning disabilities aged 18 to 33. We worked on

computers, did arts and crafts and chatted together. The language

barrier was not so great and I learned a bit of Romanian. In the

afternoon I had tutors who walked with me, taught me ceramics and

trained me to become better in my favourite sport of athletics.

This was a very important time in my life. I learned that I could do

a lot of things by myself, which had not been tested in Dublin. I

learned how to independently use transport, go to the swimming

pool on my own and started to write in my diary. I became much

more independent.

As I was an adult, my parents would often take me to cultural

events in the evening and I enjoyed that too.

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