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Try saying your full name backwards. Now imagine having to work that hard every time you need to order a meal in your favorite restaurant. Aphasia is like that. Imagine going to a foreign country where you recognize only a few words, and speak even fewer. Aphasia is like that. Aphasia is loss of language abilities, usually after stroke or similar brain injury. In rare cases, it can be an early sign of other progressive neurological disease. In all cases, aphasia steals a person’s words and can make it hard to express ideas verbally or through writing. It can also limit the ability to understand spoken and written words. Aphasia is NOT a loss of intelligence, but makes it hard for people to use words to show their competence, sense of humor, and identity.
Cowboy Aphasia Camp is offered annually on the OSU-Tulsa campus. This event partners OSU graduate students in the Communication Sciences & Disorders department and people with aphasia for a week of mutual learning. Activities include 1:1 conversational exchanges and computer-based treatment, group communication interactions, and holistic activities such as painting, music, and animal-assisted therapy. Anything that gets people talking is fair game, including a Swear Jar! This is a week that gets Neurons Firing!
The National Aphasia Association estimates that close to 2 million people in the U.S. have aphasia. This makes aphasia more common than Parkinson’s disease, but a survey by the NAA in 2020 showed that most people were not familiar with aphasia or ways to help a person who has it.
Your donation to Cowboy Aphasia Camp supports people with aphasia, and the OSU students who are learning to help them in their recovery journey. The funds are used for supplies, food (campers and students are hungry!), and other camp expenses. You are helping people with aphasia regain their identity, and you are helping OSU produce outstanding speech-language pathologists! Thank you for considering us!
Words are hard to come by when a person has aphasia. Your donation of $10 will help get words flowing by covering the cost of a dry erase board used by a camper/student team.
With aphasia, sentences can be difficult to understand and create. Your donation of $25 will help to purchase sentence-building software used in the Cowboy Aphasia Camp computer lab.
Your donation will cover the cost of camp tuition for a camper in need. This gift means more than words can say.
Your donation at this level will help sponsor coffee and breakfast during the week of camp. This is a time when campers and students swap stories and warm up for a day of hard work.
Can you hear the sounds of campers and students talking with their mouths full? Your donation will sponsor a Talking Lunch during camp, and so much laughter.
Everyone has a story. People with aphasia are no different, and camp is a way to help them tell others about their recovery journey. Your donation at this level will sponsor a portion of the expense to bring a nationally-known individual with aphasia to Cowboy Aphasia Camp, and give our campers another story to share.