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.
