Visit to Kindergarten for the Hearing Impaired

The Amity project I visited during the Nanjing Conference for Amity teachers was the Tian Lai Cun Rehabilitation Center for Hearing Impaired Children.  We learned that, in 1996 China had around 800,000 hearing impaired children under the age of 7, with projections that an additional 30,000 – 40,000 would be born each year.  This means that in 2006 there are likely already well over a million children suffering from hearing loss.  Only one percent of them have the opportunity to receive special training and rehabilitation.  The rest come from relatively poor areas and their families cannot afford the costs that generally would be involved.  The Tian Lai Cun Rehabilitation Center, located in Nanjing, is Amity’s pilot project for this target group. 

The children served come from all over China and range in age from two years old to about seven or eight years old.  Many children cannot speak at all when they first arrive and have little means of communication. With early intervention and ongoing training, the children are learning to speak and to listen with their eyes as they lip read.  In addition, they learn the same kinds of things other children learn in terms of general knowledge and how to interact with others.  They also play and dance and perform.  

The staff ratio of one adult to two children, gives lots of time for quality interaction and showing each child that he or she is truly loved and truly valued.  Through this program, the children are being trained to be able to integrate into the mainstream of society.  At seven or eight years old, when they return to their home towns they will be mainstreamed into regular public schools lead a normal life, learning everything alongside of and playing with their hearing classmates.  

 During our visit, we were all moved by these children as we touched and played together and as we learned about their lives and as they performed for us.
 

The little boy that I held was just a little over two years old and had not been at the center for long.  At first, he seemed a little scared of so many new faces, especially foreign faces, coming into his world.  Later, one of the workers taught him to call me “Nainai” (Grandma) by putting his hand on her own voice box as she pronounced the word and then moving his hand over his own voice box.  Sure enough, he clearly called out, “Nainai.”  Before the end of our visit he let me hold him.  As we left the children all wanted to come running after us.  They didn’t want to let us go, and we would have loved to have stayed, too.