Deaf Education in the Global South

Articles (America - Central and South)

South America
Adrienne Mand Lewin tells us Howard Weinstein’s story and the journey of Solar Ear, an organisation which provides hearing aids and changes lives through social entrepreneurship and supplies an affordable solar powered alternative to existing hearing aids. Solar Ear is structured as a sustainable social business to give people with a disability the chance to thrive by employing them and empowering them as workers.

Julia Barral and Vivian M Rumjanek consider the collaborative approach between school and university – teaching science to deaf students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Central America
Kathy Owston reports from her adventure where she is trying to use her skills to help the local deaf community despite the difficulties of not knowing the official Nicaraguan Sign Language and most pupils not having access to hearing aids. She also visited Famnuel Ubeda, a journalist who has founded an arts and media project for deaf people.

Kathy Owston reflects on the best way to help deaf children in Nicaragua including helping them have their own sign language dictionary

Kathy Owston continues to report on her support to deaf children in Nicaragua – in particular her time working in the special school in Estelí which has centred on gathering as much information as possible about what is happening there and to encourage communication between the different groups who are working in the field of deafness so that people work together more cohesively.

Kathy Owston provides a further update on her ongoing work in Nicaragua, partly supported by BATOD, where she has been linking up with a US-funded NGO called Mayflower Medical Outreach (MMO) and, as a long-term volunteer with their programme, she has joined their Management Board. She still finds great satisfaction in seeing the transformation in the lives of the children who can now communicate much more fully with their families and their peers.

A final report from Kathy Owston on her work to improve the lives of deaf children in Nicaragua covers a time of fear, violence and turmoil when she could no longer work, students had to be sent back to their rural areas and all the plans for a much-needed early detection of deafness programme had to be halted.