The Saint Michael’s School for the Deaf is a school for up to 140 hearing-impaired children in Kitui. The students are thaught by specially trained teachers, helping them to learn sign language, reading, writing and arithmetic.
Challenge
Many hearing impaired children in Kenya grow up deaf and mute. Although they can use sign language to communicate to others, they still live mostly isolated from society.
With professional financial and medical support, up to 80% of the children from Saint Michael’s School for the Deaf could be enabled to hear. But there is a massive lack of money and know-how to treat the children professionally. We want to change this with our “FALB- For Small Ears”- project: we want to make professional medical help accessible to the children of the Saint Michael’s School for the Deaf and enable them a better life.
Project
We collect hearing aids together with „Hilfe für kleine Ohren“ (“Help for Little Ears” from Stiftung der Deutschen Lions. In Germany, the public health insurance exchanges their insured persons hearing aids and provides a new hearing aid every six years. The old hearing aid may not be reused, even if the device is completely intact. Once discarded, the hearing aid sooner or later ends up on the trash. We want to change that: in Kenya we can refurbish the old hearing aids and have them individually adapted to the children by our professional team on site. To collect the required hearing aids in Germany, we set up boxes at our cooperation partners, hearing care professionals, ENT-doctors, nursing homes, churches and German schools for the deaf. These are picked up regularly and sent to “Hilfe für kleine Ohren”. From there they make their way to Kenya.
Help us and make hearing-impaired children in Kenya heard!
