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Well, the plans for the DeafBlind Awareness Week have certainly kept us on our toes in the last few weeks. I imagine it will continue to keep us busy right up to the week itself. The week commences on Sunday the 22nd of June and runs until Saturday the 28th of June. This incorporates Helen Keller Day on the 27th of June.
The working committee has met and discussed some exciting events and plans to undertake for the week. Watch this space for more news to come. We will be sending a special awareness week newsletter edition out in early June with all the details.
The DBA has decided to sell the 2003-2004 Entertainment Book for fundraising purposes. The book, which is filled with amazing vouchers for dining out, movies and other amusements is worth it’s weight in gold. The book costs $55 and is available by contacting the Association and the inclusion of a cheque or money order. (credit card facilities are not available). For each book sold the Association keeps $11. This money will go towards a special project.
A friendly reminder that the Association’s memberships are due at each Annual General Meeting. We do not send out individual reminders as the cost for this would be astronomical. We do post reminders in the newsletters around the time of the AGM. We find this a fair and equitable way of keeping tabs on memberships. If you know someone who would like to become a member, we will happily forward blank membership forms to you. Keep those memberships up! We love your support.
The new website is underway. We have been allocated a domain name (web address) and the site is currently being constructed. Keep an eye on www.dbasa.org.au
A reminder that we offer the newsletter in a variety of alternative formats for members. We currently offer print, email and taped versions. If these formats do not suit you, let us know and we will do our best to provide an easier format for you.
Following are two more profiles of our committee members. Our next newsletter will feature the last two profiles.
My interest evolved from being a parent of deafblind children. I have 2 daughters who are deafblind, 9 years and 12 years old respectively.
They both wear glasses and one daughter wears hearing aids. They attend a local mainstream school and have Visiting Teacher support.
My experience with deafblindness started with meeting Craig and eventually marrying and having our daughters. Before this time I had not any experience with deafblindness.
I have worked on a few charity organisations, such as Red Cross and have helped out in a voluntary capacity on a few charities.
My working life has been from office work to working in my own take-away business.
At the moment I am learning computer studies at a local high school. I do part time support work with vision and/or deafblind persons and enjoy helping my daughters be happy and successful at what they do.
I have attained a basic knowledge of AUSLAN, through TAFE, 2 years ago, which enables me to communicate with my daughters and other deaf people who I come in close contact with.
Educating the wider community about deafblindness and achieving as high a standard of living as possible for same, is my main aim for being a part of this organisation.
Hi, my name is Ted Foot. I was born in Broken Hill NSW on the 23 May 1949 and lived there with my parents, Dorothy and Dick and my sister Anne. My father owned a sports and toy shop in Argent Street which he operated until 1954 when the family moved to Adelaide so that I could attend the Oral School at Gilberton. I stayed there for years and then went to Townsend House which I enjoyed very much. I still visit some of my old teachers.
My mother passed away in 1964 and I lived with my father until he became too ill and passed away in 1986. He was a champion golfer.
I now live with my sister and her husband at Blackwood where I have been for the last 15 years. They have 2 sons and a daughter and 5 grandchildren. I play with their 2 dogs named Penny and Cassie. I enjoy spending time with the children, attending the Deaf Club, and going on excursions.
Braille and a large visual display (LVD) TTY are finally available to DeafBlind customers through Telstra's Disability Equipment Program (DEP). For further information for interested parties, including application assistance, please contact the Telstra Disability Enquiry Hotline (DEH) by TTY on 1800 808 981, by voice on 1800 068 424 or by email at disabilityenquiryhotline@team.telstra.com
My name is Julie Schneider and I am hearing and sighted. I am a research student at the University of Sydney and an occupational therapist. My professional working experience is mainly with older people, and then in the last few years, with people who are vision impaired and blind. Deafblindness is a personal interest area for me.
Some of you may have been at the conference in Sydney last year where I spoke briefly about my desire to do a research project focusing on what life is like for adults who experience deafblindness. Well the good news is I am going ahead with my research! The project has Ethics approval from the University of Sydney Human Ethics Committee, and I also have a small amount of funding to cover the costs of interpreters for doing interviews with people who are deafblind.
At this stage in my research project I am focusing on the experiences of ADULTS and specifically those people who have NOT ALWAYS been deafblind. This means people who have had vision impairment/blindness in the past and then had problems with hearing; or people who grew up Deaf or hearing impaired and later developed problems with vision (like with Ushers syndrome).
I have chosen to do research in this area because I feel that people who are deafblind do not get enough attention or support and that if we can raise awareness among the general public that it may help. I also noticed there is not very much research or writing about adults who are deafblind, and most of what is available focuses on children. I feel this is not adequate because I am sure there are many issues and challenges for adults who are deafblind as well.
I would be very interested to hear your opinions about my research and also very interested to hear from anyone who would like to take part in interviews. I can do interviews with via email.
People who are interested can email me directly on: j.schneider@fhs.usyd.edu.au
ThanksThe only way Yana knows it is lunchtime is when the toy plastic plate in the little bag she carries over her shoulder is put into her hands. The 5-year-old is blind and almost completely deaf.
"She used to be unable to do anything," said Natalya Shaboyan, the teaching assistant in charge of Yana and her three classmates at the Sergiyev Posad School for the Deaf and Blind, the world's largest boarding school of its kind.
"You don't know how happy we were when she learned to dress herself, eat by herself or make gestures to communicate with us. She is such a sensitive girl."
Yana knows it's time to eat when Shaboyan takes the small plate out of her bag and puts it into her hand for her to feel. When she grows a little older, the toys in her bag will be replaced with a small book whose pages are filled with raised symbols -- a triangle for classes, a flag for physical education, a washing machine for the laundry room, a shovel for the greenhouse, a nail for metals shop, a jar for pottery and a ball or yarn for weaving shop. She will learn to speak -- and understand -- the tactile sign language that students use here, feeling each other's hand signals. Perhaps she will also learn to use her voice. Yana is one of 170 people living on the school's sprawling 12-hectare, yellow -brick campus in Sergiyev Posad, a town dating back to a 14th-century settlement and located 60 kilometers northeast of Moscow. The youngest resident is 2 years old and the oldest is 44.
"I like to say that there are two jewels in our town: one is the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Monastery and the other is our school," said the school's director, Galina Yepifanova.
Two graduates, to whom the staff lovingly refers to as "our stars," now study at a teachers college. But, in part due to an improved survival rate for babies with multiple disabilities, an increasing number of Sergiyev Posad's students also have mental and physical disabilities.
The Soviet education of deaf and blind people started in the 1930s, when professor Ivan Sokolyansky began working with a group in Kharkiv, Ukraine. His efforts produced the Russian answer to American Helen Keller -- researcher and writer Olga Skorokhodova, who wrote poems and earned a doctorate in pedagogy. She died in 1982 at the age of 66.
After World War II, one of Sokolyansky's students, professor Alexander Meshcheryakov, continued his mentor's studies in Moscow and, in 1963, the Sergiyev Posad school was founded in what was then the town of Zagorsk. Although small groups for the blind have been formed recently in schools for the deaf, and the other way around, the Sergiyev Posad campus remains the country's only boarding school of its kind. Due to a lack of public awareness, it is not full. "We would gladly accept another 30 children," Yepifanova said.
About 50 of the 170 residents are orphans. Others, like Yana, who is from Astrakhan in southern Russia, have parents who occasionally drop by. Parents who live close enough sometimes take their children home for weekends or holidays. Graduates who have nowhere else to go remain at the campus to work. All of them are entrusted to the school's staff of 300 teachers, doctors, teaching assistants and nurses, who teach them to speak, understand, read, write, count, draw, sculpt, pray, grow plants, make rugs or -- if nothing else -- make nails. The underlying aim is to teach the students to communicate with others and lead meaningful lives.
Donations cover about 40 percent of the state-owned school's budget, Yepifanova said. Former first lady Naina Yeltsin has helped with fundraising since her first visit in 1998, and similar schools in Germany and the Netherlands have provided assistance.
The school was brought back from the brink of collapse a few years ago by private Russian donors and the Hilton/Perkins Program, administered by Helen Keller's alma mater, the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, and funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
Dennis Lolli, a regional consultant with the Hilton/Perkins Program, recalled that when he first saw the Sergiyev Posad school in 1996, it was in dire straits. "There has been a lot of change over the past few years," Lolli said, attributing this to Yepifanova's work as director.
After about $ 100,000 in aid -- including $ 25,000 worth of hearing aids over the past six years, assistance from Perkins these days largely comes in the form of training programs for teachers and teacher exchanges. Lolli said by telephone from Watertown, Massachusetts, that he will visit the school in March with an occupational therapist for a one-week seminar.
Although they evolved a world apart, the Russian and U.S. methodologies of educating deaf and blind people are surprisingly similar, Lolli said. The U.S. system is based on practical situations such as teaching how to cook with communication skills built into each situation, while the Russian and European system is "a little less functional and more classroom oriented," Lolli said.
The bigger issue is how to make education available to more Russian children - - at least 1,200 deaf and blind children live in European Russia alone, Lolli said.
Nh2>JOKEA Mafia gang takes on a deaf man to run their deliveries, feeling it would be safer having someone unable to overhear conversations. However, one day when he is to deliver a large sum of money, he never shows up with it. The mobsters track him down, but don't find the money on him. As none of them are able to use sign language, they bring in an interpreter.
Mobster: "Where'd you hide the money?" (Interpreter signs the question.)
The bag man signs his reply. The interpreter says, "He says he had to ditch it in the river because the cops were onto him."
Mobster: "I'm not fooling around! You better tell me where that money is!" (Interpreter again signs.)
The bag man signs his reply, and the interpreter relays, "He swears he is telling the truth. He had to get rid of it."
The mobster pulls out a revolver and points it between the deaf man's eyes. "Tell me where that money is, or I'll kill you right now!"
(Interpreter signs his statement.)
The bag man, sweating profusely, signs, "It's inside a shoebox under a loose floorboard in my bedroom closet."
The interpreter says, "He says he doesn't know where it is and he doesn't think you have the guts to pull the trigger."
Emma Gordon - President, Phil Vandepeer - Vice President, Craig Gordon - Secretary, John Crawford - Treasurer, Stephen Hellier, Ted Foote, Marilyn Gordon.
The DeafBlind Association of SA does not necessarily endorse or support any of the articles that appear within this newsletter. We include articles that may be of interest to the deafblind and wider community. The Association thanks the continuing support of the Strathmont Centre in printing these newsletters at no cost. We also thank John and Pauline Locke for producing and mailing the newsletter. We support the blind community in providing easy to read, text only newsletters. We also provide this newsletter in alternative formats.
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