Wednesday 21 July 2010

Summer in the ChangSha Deaf Centre


This spring has been an exciting time in the ChangSha Deaf Centre. Due to your continued support, we are now able to now admit 102 students from 2-7 years that would otherwise would have a very uncertain future. With your support, we are not only able to keep the school fees low enough so that quite poor households can afford this education, but we are also able to admit 7 students from very poor households free of charge.
Even though the children in our centre are from poor households and as deaf children often have a disadvantage in today’s China, we are very excited about the fact that they are reaching out to the community and bring happiness to others. In China, Children’s day (June 1st) is celebrated in a big way. This day, children and parents, along with the leaders, gathered in the botanical garden to have a party, celebration and a performance.
On May 16th, National Disability Day, they carried out activities involving caring for the handicapped in the local community by giving performances. For the National Ear Care Day, the children carried out a public campaign and education programs about ear care in the park using performances, leaflets, and consultation methods. It is exciting to see how the children thrive on doing performances and making others happy!
Seeing what a blessing the ChangSha deaf centre is to our students, we are very happy that our headmaster, Xueying Wang, was able to go to Huaihua to help setting up a new rehabilitation center for deaf children!
Our premises are still quite small, so we are delighted that volunteers from local universities and secondary schools often come to take the children to visit museums, go to the parks or river the banks for activities of different types.
Since our last blog post, we have also run a lot of training sessions for parents and teachers. We added a new regular parent training session every Friday this year to encourage parents to participate in the rehabilitation of deaf children and learn to communicate with and share more with their children. We can see how this is having a positive effect. Our teachers have been trained by experts from both the University of Melbourne (Australia) and Taiwan and our teachers have also taken part in the Hunan Symposium about the rehabilitation of deaf children.
We praise God for His blessings and protection!