deafness – Open Ears Archive

Hear Haiti: The Future of Haiti

Open Ears is following a group of Sonova team members as they head to Haiti with the Hear The World Foundation. Michael Lumunsad is a Strategic Marketer at Advanced Bionics LLC. He enjoys talking about the most random topics with his AB coworkers, Brendan, Jiselle, and Jessica.

Day 3:

Written on the sign was “12 JANVYE 2010 – AYITI PAP BLIYE” which means, “12 January 2010 – Haiti Will Not Forget”.

DOHQ6483 — The Haiti Earthquake Memorial

As we passed the 2010 earthquake memorial, we were reminded of why our Hear the World team and many other humanitarian teams were in Haiti. We came to help the people who were victims of the tremendous tragedy. Three million people were affected and more than 250,000 people died. The new memorial was built on the mass grave of these people and it’s supposed to remind the world of how many innocent lives were lost in this wonderful country.

Our two vans made the hour drive to a coastal school near Port-au-Prince. We were greeted by energetic and laughing children who wanted hugs from each and every one of us. These kids and their families were the survivors of the earthquake and they will be the future of the country. Continue reading “Hear Haiti: The Future of Haiti”

Dating with hearing loss: Date spots, cuddling and lip reading in the dark

I got inspiration for this blog post from Rikki Poynter’s video, ‘Dating While Deaf.’ For those who don’t know who Rikki is, she’s a deaf YouTuber, a massive Pikachu fan, an advocate for closed captioning, and just an ordinary teenager like me!

As a person with hearing loss, there’s two sides to dating… being with a normal hearing person or with a deaf partner.

Personally, I’ve been in a deaf-hearing relationship before, and it didn’t work out. I wouldn’t say it was my deafness that ended it, as I am very capable in life with communicating, but I’d just like to point out that he could have been more understanding with my needs. (Like he didn’t get my attention when talking to me, or couldn’t be bothered to repeat what he said… so the whole thing didn’t work anyway.)

After this experience, I had doubts about whether I was ever going to be in a relationship again. I felt like all the boys my age were very judgmental and immature. At the time I also had this misconception that all deaf boys were signers, which worried me because I’ve never really interacted with deaf people before, so I felt that I wasn’t going to be able to communicate with them.

A few years ago, however, my views on dating changed when I went to a deaf young leader’s course, and met my boyfriend! Continue reading “Dating with hearing loss: Date spots, cuddling and lip reading in the dark”

Learning Sign Language with a Baby or Toddler

Learning sign language with your deaf or normal hearing baby

We started learning sign language as soon as we found out about Harry’s hearing loss.

Even though Harry has a cochlear implant and can hear our voices, we wanted him to know the basics of sign language for the future. Not only to better communicate with him, but also to be a part of the deaf community. He is still a deaf person after all, and he may very well have deaf friends who only use sign language to communicate.

Not only is sign language useful for children with hearing loss, but its also great for hearing children to learn as well. Even when they are very young, a baby’s motor skills and ability to make hand gestures are far more developed than their ability to speak, which makes it really very easy for them to learn the basics of sign language. You will be so shocked at how fast a little baby can start to copy different hand gestures, eventually realizing they can use their hands to tell you what they need! Imagine if your baby could tell you what they want via signing instead of screaming and wailing!

With help from our Teacher of the Deaf, Harry he had a whole range of signs he was using to communicate with us by the time he was around 9 months old.

Continue reading “Learning Sign Language with a Baby or Toddler”

Finding out our baby was Deaf

We were still getting used to the fact we had a mini human who was awake most of the night when we found out that Harry was deaf. He was just 7 weeks old when he failed the Newborn Hearing Screening.

After a series of tests and a very intensive ABR he was confirmed as profoundly deaf with no threshold of hearing. The emotions hit us like a steam train and immediately we felt worried and scared for what the future would hold for our perfect baby boy. I remember that day so clearly; when my partner Scott and I held each other close and cried ourselves to sleep. We almost had to mourn what our idea of a perfect child was, and come around to the fact that our experience as first time parents was going to be a little different than what we had expected.

We spent a good few days feeling extremely upset and worried for our little chap. Our baby was the only deaf person we had ever met. It was a completely new thing to learn about. I started to panic when I left him alone to sleep, as I thought he would wake up and be scared because he couldn’t hear us. It took me a while to realize that actually Harry had never known any different, and he shouldn’t be scared because to him the world had always been silent.

It was as quick as the day after Harry’s diagnosis when we had a phone call from our local Teacher of the Deaf. The amount of information being fed to us was quite overwhelming, but comforting knowing a support system was already in place. She came over soon after to introduce herself, and we immediately felt confident that our son wasn’t going to be forgotten about or left behind. She explained that she would help us with his development from Day 1 until he finished his education, which filled us with hope and a lot more confidence than we had initially had.

Continue reading “Finding out our baby was Deaf”

Deafie Blogger joins Open Ears

Hi there, let me introduce myself. My name is Ellen, but my friends call me Ellie. I live in Norfolk, UK. Some of you may know me as Deafie Blogger. I’m 18 years old, and I’ve been profoundly deaf since birth. I wear two digital Phonak hearing aids, which allow me to communicate through lip-reading and speech. I don’t use British Sign Language, although I’d love to learn one day. I’m a typical teenager, and I love being sociable, spending time with family and friends, travelling and swimming.

Of course, I’m proud to be deaf, because I wouldn’t have achieved what I have, if I was hearing. I would just be ordinary. I am passionate about deaf awareness, no doubt about it. Over the past year I’ve really gotten interested in blogging and deaf culture, and I’m hoping that I can enthuse and encourage other deaf teenagers to prove that they can achieve anything they dream of. I love writing about everyday situations in the life of a deaf person, with the aim of making others feel as if they’re not alone.

Continue reading “Deafie Blogger joins Open Ears”

19 Percent

19.1 percent.

That’s the number of people with disabilities working in the US, compared to 68.2 percent without disabilities, according to United States Department of Labor’s September 2015 Disability Employment Statistics.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has laws that make discrimination on the basis of disability illegal, but my high school experience showed me the slippery ways people in power can bypass these laws.

In my first post-graduate job, a makeup salesperson at a major US department store, I received diversity training, which included many topics: language inclusivity; recognizing racial bias; respect of different religions. But what struck me was the topic of disability.

When I first entered the workforce, my parents encouraged me to hide my disability because I passed for able-bodied better than most people in my position. Any discrimination, they believed, would be brought by my openness, and they suspected it would be better for me to be quiet. Typically, I would have rejected this advice, telling my parents I would not be shackled by chains of ableism created by ignorant people, however, I was nervous about my post-collegiate future and felt adrift in the “real world” after almost 20 years of academia. I hated living at home and I wanted to earn money, but I was not sure if moving out and making a living would be possible if I was open about my hearing loss. Wanting to err on the side of caution, I nervously chose to go into hiding on my first day of work.

Continue reading “19 Percent”

Hear Armenia: Ensuring little ears can hear

Open Ears is following a group of Sonova team members as they head to Armenia with the Hear The World Foundation. Elena Torresani leads the department of the Hear the World Foundation. She is passionate about her job, is creative and enthusiastic. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, travelling, doing yoga and spending time with her loved ones.

Every year, about 665,000 babies around the world are born with significant hearing loss. This is a statistic that, as a foundation, empowers us to help make a difference in these children’s lives.

Since 2010, The Hear the World Foundation has been supporting the Arabkir Hospital in Yerevan to develop a newborn hearing screening program. Since then, the program has expanded to five additional provinces of Armenia. Now, all infants born at these locations receive a newborn hearing screenings 48 hours after birth!

We saw firsthand the success of this program during our visit to the Institute of Perinatology on Thursday, where we watched baby Haik have an Otoacoustic emissions (OAE) test, which can detect blockage in the outer ear canal, as well as the presence of middle ear fluid and damage to the outer hair cells in the cochlea.

[wpvideo Ae9VWym6]

Continue reading “Hear Armenia: Ensuring little ears can hear”

Hear Armenia: Helping an earthquake ravaged country hear

After a successful trip to Haiti to provide support to children who have hearing loss, Hear The World Foundation is heading to Armenia. Open Ears will be following the group of Sonova team members on their journey. As Head of the Hear the World initiative, Elena Torresani leads the department of the Hear the World Foundation. She is passionate about her job and is creative and enthusiastic. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, travelling, yoga and spending time with her loved ones.

Hear Armenia

Armenia is a country with a great need for action and support of its health industry.

In December 1988, two earthquakes – measuring at 6.9 and 5.8 in magnitude – hit Armenia, killing up to 50,000 people and destroying nearly half a million buildings. Weakened by the earthquake, and the demise of the Soviet Union, Armenia’s economy broke down. The country began gaining some momentum in the late ‘90s when market reform was introduced, but the industrial sector continued to suffer. Ten years later, the 2008 financial crisis put the country again in jeopardy, destroying the positive developments made after the earthquakes. Today, 20 percent of Armenians live on less than $2 a day. Their access to healthcare is a question of money, as approximately 60 percent of healthcare costs are paid for by the patient out-of-pocket. The state spends less than 2 percent of gross domestic product on healthcare for the population, and hospitals often don’t have the necessary equipment or well-trained medical personnel.

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Hear Haiti: Haiti, the Unbelievable

Open Ears is following a group of Sonova team members as they head to Haiti with the Hear The World Foundation. Jenn Brinn is a digital marketer who works at Sonova e-Hearing Care in Nashville, Tennessee. She is passionate about technology, travel, coffee, documentaries, and her family.

Day 8

Over the years, The Hear the World Foundation has been sending volunteers on dozens of service trips with the mission of providing better access to hearing healthcare to those in need around the globe. Historically, these volunteers have been Sonova employees with a clinical audiology background; after all, the majority of the work on these trips is to fit and recheck hearing aids. Since starting work at Sonova a year-and-a-half ago, I would get the emails asking for volunteers for this or that service trip, but none of the qualification criteria matched my skill set.

In May, I finally got the email I’d been waiting for…the trip to Haiti in October of 2015 needed a communications volunteer. Seeing as my background and interests are in digital marketing and communications, this opportunity was a perfect fit. I applied, and in early July was notified that I was selected to be the first volunteer with a dedicated role of being the trip historian/documentarian. Since I am not an audiologist, I immediately began brainstorming how I could leverage my hobbies (and day job)–which consists of photography, videography, social media, and content creation–to best capture the spirit of the people we were setting out to serve. The answer, I would come to find out, was about to reveal itself to me in a way I wouldn’t have believed if I didn’t experience it for myself.

It began when our plane touched down in Port Au Price around 3 p.m. Sunday. The airport was small and crowded. The baggage claim carousel was chaos–people pulling bags off as quickly as they were released, elbowing one another out of the way, knocking into each other with luggage carts. Once the area cleared, my bag was nowhere to be found. After searching and waiting for over an hour, I surrendered to the fact that my luggage was either taken by mistake or stolen. Not wanting to hold up the team any longer, we loaded up the bus and headed to New Life Children’s Home where we would be staying for the week. I thought, surely in a few hours someone will call saying they had taken my bag by mistake and it would be returned to me. But by 9 p.m., my phone hadn’t rung. It was time to start asking my travel mates to borrow pajamas, a toothbrush, and something to sleep in. In the poorest country in the Americas, the only items I had to my name were the clothes on my back and my camera and computer, which I traveled with in my carry-on backpack. Talk about being out of your comfort zone!

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Hear Haiti: Getting More Than You Give

Open Ears is following a group of Sonova team members as they head to Haiti with the Hear The World Foundation. Carina Rodriquez is the Clinical Manager of Latin America for Advanced Bionics. She is originally from Uruguay, and moved to southern California two years ago.

Day 7:

I joined this Hear the World mission as part of the diagnostic audiology team. Although the daily profession is second-nature to us back in the States, here in Haiti we are learning the true significance of our role. The medical professional aspect of hearing impairment and thinking about it as a “job” seems less important here in Haiti, and it has become an expression of love towards the patients–responding to their needs from our hearts.

Continue reading “Hear Haiti: Getting More Than You Give”