Hearing Aids Needed

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32245, 13 March 1970, Page 2

Hearing Aids Needed

Hearing aids are needed urgently for deaf children at a U.N.I.C.E.F. - sponsored kindergarten in Bangkok. The Christchurch regional U.N.I.C.E.F. president, Mrs Doreen Grant, visited the kindergarten recently while in Bangkok to attend the nineteenth triennial conference of the International Council of Women. She has undertaken to send over any hearing aids no longer needed by New Zealanders. After Mrs Grant mentioned the.need for help for deaf children in the kindergarten in an address to the Canterbury Travel Club yesterday, several members offered hearing aids that were no longer in use. In Bangkok, a hearing aid cost about SUSIOO and a person usually had to try two or three before a suitable one was decided upon, said Mrs Grant. Batteries for the aids lasted only about 18 days, and cost $1 to replace. The U.N.1.C.E.F.-sponsored kindergarten was an experiment which started only five weeks before she arrived In Bangkok. Four hundred children, aged from three to

six years, were delivered there by their parents each morning and taken home each evening. Among them were about a dozen deaf children, most of whom stayed at the kindergarten.

“They have come from poor families and have been rejected by their parents because they are handicapped. Until recently, we in New Zealand also tended to hide away those with any sort of handicap,” said Mrs Grant. All the deaf children she saw were boys. One was the son of the cook at the kindergarten, who had taken the job to be near her child. Working for U.N.I.C.E.F. at the kindergarten was a Canadian woman doctor, who specialised in deafness. She told Mrs Grant of the difficulty in obtaining enough hearing aids to help the children, because of the expense. U.N.I.C.E.F. contributed to the cost of running the kindergarten and the children who were hard of hearing mixed with the others for the pre-school education programme, Mrs Grant said.

“All the children wear little uniforms. They are given morning and afternoon snacks and a cooked meal in the middle of the day. Dur-

ing the afternoon, they are all changed into little, white sleeping suits and. they go to their own little beds for a two-hour sleep,” she said. “The parents whose children are not deaf pay the equivalent of $7 a term in fees. This is quite a sacrifice, especially as many of them also come very long distances to deliver their children and pick them up at the end of the day.”

Mrs Grant also visited the U.N.I.C.E.F. health service in Bangkok which provided medical treatment for mothers and children in the mornings and ran lectures in health and hygiene in the afternoon.

Once a week there was a talk on family planning, illustrated with pictures by way of explanation to those who could not read.