Hello on Saturday in Saigon, Vietnam;
I am at the Saturday conference called; Maximizing hearing Potential for Children with Hearing Loss or PHAT HUY TOI DA TIEM NANGNGHE CHO TRE KHIEM THINH.
Over one hundred teachers, physical therapists, doctors, and parents are listening to learn about how to teach children who are deaf. Every seat is taken. People stand in the back of the large conference hall.
The morning presentations go well. Paige Stringer first speaks about living with a profound hearing loss. She offers three reasons as to why she thinks she can communicate as well as she can; her supportive family, her love of reading, and that she was encouraged to find something that she was really good at – for her it was sports – particularly tennis. Judy Simser talks about Auditory-Verbal Practice – giving her personal and professional perspectives. She highlights that the children really need to develop their hearing because Vietnamese like Mandarin has tones. Sometimes the same work can mean something quite different if not pronounced with the correct tone. Lip reading or visual information will not help with that, you can not see the tones. Jane Madell gives a good talk on helping children hear emphasizing testing and fitting technology properly. Charlotte Ducote speaks about facilitating language development. Many parents ask about their child developing clear speech. Charlotte emphasizes that we cannot develop clear speech skills until we have adequate language development. Speech and language develop concurrently.
Jane Madell talks about testing babies with some every cute videos. Judy Simser talked about mainstreaming, giving tips from her personal experience being the mom of a profoundly deaf boy. Whoops! She forgets to mention an educational audiologist on the team and Jane Madell reminds her. Sharad Govil, a smart audiologist who works for Phonak in Singapore, talks more about technology and FM systems. He plays a recording that allows us to hear how accurate an FM sounds.
In between lectures, Judy and I see a few children and their parents out on the veranda. Checking to see how well they are listening with their hearing aids and giving suggestions as to what they can do to help them listen and learn spoken language. These little children are so cute and curious about us, well except for the ones who are shy and cry! We cannot help them or the ones who have middle ear fluid today.
At lunch I sit with Leah Labrador from Cochlear on my left and Thuy on my right. I meet Le Thi Minh ha, the dean of the Ho Chi Minh Coty University faculty of Special Education. She is the dean for the interpreters who I love( from our work at Binh Tanh ). This elegant woman tells me she is going to University of Oregon in Eugene for five weeks in February! She speaks English pretty well. We go for a walk after lunch. She helps me cross the street to follow Thuy as Thuy enters Cat Tuong, the Phonak dealer office with a family. There is a child who got hearing aids from Paige’s Global Foundation this week who says they are broken, so the parents want to check the hearing aids. I see the kid and notice he has lots of spots on his legs and arms – either this kid has been bitten alive by mosquitoes or he is recovering from measles! My instinct tells me to get out of the office asap. That was the one vaccination I opted out of for this trip. I turn and leave…immediately realizing oh no, I have to cross the street by myself!
Crossing the streets in Vietnam is bizarre. The cars, trucks and motorbikes go and never stop. They might slow down or veer slightly to go around you as you meander out on the pavement and move through the vehicles. Vietnamese drivers are nimble, maybe the most dexterous drivers in the world. They understand how the flow of traffic relates to the stream of pedestrians. No one hurries. Somehow it works. We do not see anyone get hit or any motorbike crash – amazing.
I make it safely across – just walking with the vehicles flying by me.
Back at the conference, I see teachers from the Binh Tanh school in Saigon where we taught for Thursday and Friday. Oanh wearing a pretty yellow ruffled shirt today came up to me at the start of the conference and wanted to say something to me. Because I do not speak Vietnamese and she does not speak English, we could not communicate. After lunch I spot her near the back of the auditorium. I find an interpreter and ask her if she had a question earlier. She says she wants to thank me again for coming to her class. She says I am kind and very helpful. That makes me feel so good. Thank you, Oanh! We chat on about the conference, teaching, and she wants to know if I like Vietnam. I ask the interpreter to take a photo of us. That stirs all the other teachers into action. Before I know it, we are all laughing and posing for the camera. One teacher spots Paige and calls her over to join in the silly lunch break fun – so good for our brains to laugh after listening all morning. After some laughing our brains are ready to listen better to the afternoon speakers.
What a day! Thank you, Paige, for organizing this important event – sharing AVT knowledge with professionals who attended from all corners of Vietnam – north and south, villages and cities, sign language and spoken language, hearing aids and cochlear implants, professionals and parents!
Paige makes a reservation at this cool restaurant in the downtown of DaNang. Our taxi driver is a little scary as he drives on the wrong side of the road and then cannot seem to keep the car going in a straight line. We cross the big swing bridge - the most famous thing in DaNang now. Somehow, we arrive safely at Apsara to enjoy traditional music and dance called "Apsara".
We survived a seven hour minibus ride along narrow not well maintained roads with lots of trucks, some cars, and hundreds of motorbikes.