By Annerina Grobbelaar | Project Leader
"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another." (Charles Dickens)
As a new organisation to GlobalGiving, we had such an exciting time during the Open Challenge, and were delighted that we got our permament spot on the GlobalGiving website! We would like to sincerely express our thanks to all who made this possible - by donating, sharing and spreading the word about our project! We received the money into our bank account about two weeks ago, and with our poor foreign exchange rate regarding the South African Rand, we actually had more money paid in than what we initially expected! Definitely one of the few times that the poor Rand was actually beneficial!
I would like to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about the unchartered territory that we face in terms of establishing a pediatric hearing care service in the rural areas of our beautiful country. As similar services are fairly non-existent, we have to be extremely creative when it comes to adapting so-called "Western" or "First-World" models of service delivery to suit the infrastructure, socio-economic circumstances and resources of a Third World country. For instance, we have been supplying auditory-verbal therapy sessions to the children in our clinic, but are unable to use most of the traditional toys for learning activities, such as dolls, soft toys, cause-and-effect toys etc, due to the extreme poverty that our children live in, and the subsequent poor exposure to traditional toys. These children are actually quite afraid of dolls and soft toys, and regular toys that we tend to use won't be available at home. The children are playing at home with empty containers, rocks, balls, and an array of home-made toys. They are also not familiar with aeroplanes, trains, and other experiences and specific noise-making objects that play an integral part in learning to listen. But we have been adjusting our sessions and experimenting with alternatives, and are pleased to say that we are making lots of progress in helping our deaf children with learning to listen and talk in a culturally-appropriate way!
Since we received the funds from GlobalGiving a few weeks ago, we have used some of your generous donations to purchase a Stokke Tripp-Trapp chair for our therapy sessions, as well as commisioned a therapy table to be made for our therapy room. This will ensure that the children will be "grounded" during our sessions in order to reserve more physical and mental energy for listening tasks. Know that this will make a huge impact, as the auditory-verbal therapy is where the hard work lies in ensuring that these kids are afforded the same opportunity for spoken language development as their normal-hearing friends!
As for the future, we are saving up to buy a real-ear analyzer, which will verify our children's hearing aid fittings, making sure that the aids are doing in the ears what they say they are doing on the computer screen, thus making sure that we are not under- or overamplifying the sounds we send into the little ears! We are still about $2000 off for that piece of equipment, but trust that we will be able to buy it soon!
" You'll never be disappointed if you always keep an eye on unchartered territory, where you'll be challenged and growing, and having fun!" (Kirstie Alley)
We cannot agree more!
Have a good week!
The Sound for Silence Team
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