Joy of Sound

The Rotary Club of Chennai Kilpauk is working towards enhancing the learning experiencing for hearing impaired students by creating digital content for the TN State Board exams and providing smart classrooms to schools for the hearing impaired. All schools in the city of Chennai have been covered and now the rest of the State of Tamilnadu is the target.

The initial funding for the Joy of Sound came from RC Strathcona Sunrise and TRF.

The project Chairman is Rtn. PP Mahimm Gupta

Here is a video about the project.

Hearing Aids - ROTI project with RC of Galesburg, Illinois supported by TRF.

This project which is supported by ROTI and is a MG with RC of Galesburg, Illinois has seen many people hearing for the first time. Giving great relief to elders and parents and children.

A camp was conducted in a village close to Chennai to identify those with hearing impairment, hearing aids were distributed by DG AP Kanna on March 7th.

It was heartening to note that this project has been instrumental in changing the lives of so many and in so many different ways. One would think how an hearing aid would benefit the elderly BUT it does. An elderly lady said that she would now be able to walk on the roads peacefully as she could hear the traffic and more over she would be able to enter into conversations with her friends as she could hear and then respond. She would no more be set apart because of hearing difficulties.

Should the hearing aids go to those who are young? to those who will benefit the most? Should we disregard the elderly who are nearing their end? or those who are too ill to move around? At this distribution function an elderly man was given a hearing aid and he later told me that he would no longer have to avoid his friends, neighbours and nor would they avoid him and he would now be able to converse with them. I doubt if we will ever realise the pain of the hearing impaired at whatever age.

So much more needs to be done...

Hearing Impaired Screening Camp - MG with RC of Galesburg - ROTI Project

This matching grant project which is partnered with Rotary Club of Galesburg, Illinois, started yesterday with the first screening camp and had a wonderful response.

Many residents of close to 19 villages  surrounding the camp had come and some of them staying as far as 35 kilometers away on the outskirts of North Chennai.  The campaign for calling people to get checked was extremely effective and from these villages whose population is close to about 4000 numbers, we were able to call about 200 of them to visit in a single day.  The effectiveness of the campaigning done by Dr Sandhya Ruban (of Eternity Foundation)  and her team of volunteers was fantastic, enabling it specifically call for patients with hearing abnormalities.

We had team of the following specialists :

DR KAMATCHIPANDIAN – DOCTOR ATTACCHED TO E N T DEPARTMENT K M C

MR PRAVESH – AUDIOLOGIST

MR SANDEEP – AUDIOLOGIST

We were also honoured to have the presence of Mrs Neela Govindaraj ( Speech Therapist and Language Assessor of specially challenged) who had accompanied with Ms Uma (a social service initiator who also works with IBM).  Both Mrs Neela and Ms Uma sat for a long time and helped in coordinating and handling the visiting patients. They interacted and counseled the visitors on a one to one basis, which was really interesting to see them doing their roles in gathering more insights to the various challenges faced by the villagers.

We also witnessed misery at its lowest point  in the case of certain individuals who felt extremely helpless with their lives.  Hence we could sense there was lots to be done in terms of community service to these villages, and there was potential for plenty of them who needed to be living in standard basic amenities.

Finally coming back to hearing impairment and hearing aid cases, we have crossed 100 deserving beneficiaries and individuals cases are being discussed in a couple of days with the Doctors, to analyse and shortlist hearing aids beneficiaries.