Through our collaborative work with the Şişli Association for the Hearing and Speech Impaired, we have brought smiles to the faces of many children.
‘Disability,’ defined as the inability to perform tasks that a typical individual would normally do independently in their personal or social life due to inherited or acquired physical or mental impairments, consists of five main categories: intellectual, visual, hearing and speech, orthopedic, and chronic disabilities.
When we focus on the children with hearing and speech impairments, which have been our top priority before and after the establishment of our organization, according to the data from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1998, there are 466 million hearing-impaired individuals worldwide. Unfortunately, 34 million of them are children under the age of 15. However, the production of hearing devices meets less than 10% of the global demand. This means that it covers less than 3% of the needs of hearing-impaired individuals in developing countries. In Turkey, there are 247,056 children between the ages of 0 and 14 who are registered in the National Disability System and have hearing impairments.
Hearing loss can have genetic origins, but it can also occur as a result of chronic ear infections, the long-term use of certain medications, excessive exposure to loud noise, and specific medical conditions. Hearing aids, cochlear implants, which are electronic medical devices developed for individuals with severe or profound hearing loss, and other tools, along with speech therapies and auditory rehabilitation, can improve the quality of life for individuals with hearing impairments.
As an association, we initially chose to provide hearing aids for our children because it was a costly device that varied in price due to foreign exchange rates and purchasing power. We did not want our children, who were unable to access this device solely due to financial constraints, to experience the difficulties caused by hearing loss, struggle in communication with others, miss out on education, and, in short, have their emotional and social lives negatively affected. Now, it’s time to expand the solidarity we have initiated, and we seek your support. Let’s all come together and say ‘Gülümse Çocuk(Smile Child)’ to another child.
