Changsha Deaf Center Project Progress Report

Here is a new update on the ChangSha Deaf Centre:

Xinde Rehabilitation Center is a non-profit organization providing rehabilitation service for handicapped children. It was founded by the Church of Hunan Province in Changsha City in the year of 2001. The center was registered in the Bureau of Civil Affairs in the same year and started to work for children with learning difficulties and hard of hearing.

Their very good rehabilitation services for deaf children have given them a good reputation as a reliable centre among the families with deaf children. More and more children are asking to go to this school, making the need for expansion more and more urgent. This also means a need for more places, more equipment, more teachers and improvement of teachers’ capacity. This all translates into the need for more investment.

There are 100 children and 25 teachers in the school that currently occupy 700m². Most of the children are from poor mountainous areas in Hunan Province. Their families are quite poor and could not afford the cost for rehabilitation if they had to pay for it themselves. These people need external help and support, so the centre is greatly appreciative for NMS’s support.

Completed Activities:

During the reporting period Changsha Deaf Center has successfully purchased new equipment, desks, chairs and toys for children with disabilities.
A training program has also been given to teachers in the center.

Changsha Deaf Center has devoted itself to the rehabilitation of deaf children. In 2009, the center improved basic facilities for living and studying for the children. New equipments for audition testing and adjustment have been purchased.

In addition to this, new desks, chairs and toys are bought in, and electricity supply system has been reconstructed so that the center can avoid power cuts in summer, which was frequent in the past. The Center also taught the children how to protect themselves and avoid accidental injuries. Two parents training sessions have been held to help the parents.

They learned how to develop their children’s audition, how to communicate with their children etc. Sixteen teachers went to XiangYa Hospital to study audiology for a whole day, and one teacher was sent to Beijing to study audiology for a week.

Results:

Thanks to the generous contribution from Norwegian Mission Society, the teaching facilities of the center have been improved, while teachers feel more confident to serve for children with disabilities.

With the basic equipment, the center is now able to test children’s audition and provide more effective instruction to develop the children’s audition.

With improved facilities and better equipped teachers and parents, the children are able to make better progress. It is such a pleasure to see how these great kids are developing and interacting!

Moreover, these well-trained teachers could be able to undertake more tasks that they didn’t know how to do in the past. The advanced knowledge they received will help them do better work in the future.