Uganda is home to over 10,000 registered NGO’s according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There seems to be an NGO or CBO to cover every imaginable niche in healthcare, and deciding what area to put your energy into is a bit overwhelming. Fortunately GHC tends to nudge us in the right direction, offering opportunities to volunteer with great organizations like the Starkey Hearing Foundation.
For two days, I participated in small team of volunteers in Kampala to fit men, women and children with hearing aids. My courses in grad school focused on HIV prevention, malaria education, reducing maternal deaths, but the loss of something is basic as hearing and the impact that would have on a child growing up in Uganda had never crossed my mind.
Over the course of those two days, I heard stories about children who had been placed in schools for the mentally retarded because they couldn’t hear. Mothers admitted to keeping their children at home because a village school couldn’t accommodate a hearing impaired child. We struggled to communicate with patients who never learned sign language and couldn’t speak with words because they had never heard their own voice.
But I had the immense privilege to witness a child hearing their own voice for the first time. After about 20 minutes to finding the correct setting, we flipped the switch on Jonny’s hearing aids and by using the feel of vibrations in his throat, Jonny imitated the “ba ba ba” noise we were making. Instantly, you could see his astonishment to hearing a voice, his voice. He could hardly contain his excitement. While Jonny was running around yelling “ba ba ba,” his family had become speechless. A lot of patience, twenty minutes and a pair of hearing aids had changed his world forever.
