US charity brings joy to deaf Syrian refugee children

Workshops in Lebanon by the Chicago-based Deaf Planet Soul were the first chance for many to receive help for their condition.

Syrian refugee Aya Al Souqi, 6, has her hearing tested by Zaineb Abdulla, right, vice president of the Chicago-based charity Deaf Planet Soul, in Joub Jannine village in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley on MarcShow more

BAR ELIAS, LEBANON // Six-year-old Aya Al Souqi, a Syrian refugee, held the camera phone up to her face and exclaimed, “I hear you!”

It was only the second time she’d spoken to her mother, who now lives in Germany, since getting fitted with a hearing aid by a Chicago-based charity.

Aya, timid and small, was a little over a year old in 2012 when a rocket struck her family’s house in the Eastern Ghouta countryside, outside the Syrian capital, Damascus.

The strike killed Aya’s father and, the family believes, damaged her right ear. Shortly afterward, the family moved to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of other Syrians now live as refugees, to wait out a war with still no conclusion in sight.

“She used to respond to her name and play with other children,” said her grandmother, Hayan Hashmeh. “When we came to Lebanon, we noticed that her hearing was very limited.”

The “Deaf Planet Soul” charity is on its first relief mission to Lebanon to treat Syrians, both young and old, suffering from hearing loss. ost have been affected by the war in their homeland.

For many of the young patients, this is the first time they have seen by experts in hearing loss.

“When people think of refugees, they think of cut-off limbs and brain injuries, and all these visible things,” said Zaineb Abdulla, a therapist and vice president of Deaf Planet Soul.

“They don’t think about the invisible results of war. They don’t think that this kid who can’t hear really needs help.”

The team of five audiologists, therapists, and a student are working in clinics around Lebanon during the charity’s two-week mission. In a makeshift clinic above a petrol station in Al Marj, Gregory Perez, a mental health professional, used sign language to communicate with seven-year-old Jana Faour, a Syrian-Palestinian girl raised in Lebanon, who is deaf.

Her parents don’t have the funds to enrol her in a school for the deaf, so her mother is teaching her Arabic sign language from whatever lessons she finds online.

Jana, who usually depends on her doting younger sister to be her voice, was thrilled to be able to sign with someone new. Though Mr Perez signs in American sign language, the two found they knew many words in common and they chatted way excitedly. Jana looked up at her parents and beamed.

“It’s the first time someone sees to what I want, which was to have Jana meet a therapist, to work with her personality instead of just her hearing,” said her mother, Samar.

Mr Perez and Ms Abdulla are both deaf. Mr Perez can only speak haltingly and said he founded the charity last year to “empower the deaf and help the deaf community be more independent”.

He and his colleague are role models for their young patients, many of whom have never met a deaf professional before.

Aya’s mother, Kinaz Khatib, left for Germany in 2015, crossing the Mediterranean to southern Europe by boat, hoping to secure the right to bring her children over. Sitting with her siblings and cousins in an unfurnished apartment, Aya explained that the family was waiting for the “papers” which would allow them to be reunited.

Her hearing loss has made the separation especially difficult, her grandmother said. As well as not being able to hear her mother on the phone, she was doing poorly in school.

But with her hearing aid on, Aya was transformed. “How are you?” she asked her mother. “I miss you.”

Her mother told her the hearing aid looked very nice on her. Aya smiled.

The Deaf Planet Soul team held workshops for children over 10 days in different locations in Lebanon. They returned to Chicago on March 16 to raise funds for another mission.

“This is a forever project,” said Mr Perez.

* Associated Press