Skip to main content

Mute and Deaf

As part of Anne's religious activity, she takes care of members of her society in Sg Buloh. Last week, she met this new member. She's 18 and she's a mute and deaf person. I believe she's born that way. Her parents sent her to a disabled school and she learned to read and write basic Malay. Anne told me that she conversed with her mother in Malay - it is strange to see a Chinese mother speaking to her mute and deaf daughter in Malay - the main reason is that many of the schools for disabled are run by the government and many of them are run by Malay people.

Even though I have not met her, I felt very strongly about helping this girl. Everyday I encourage Anne to give her English lessons. I feel that being mute and deaf is not as bad as say, blind. If the girl knows how to read in English, I feel that she will be open to a whole new world - there are so many English literatures - non fiction books - religious, inspiration, history, you name it.. and of course novels. What's more, with the popularity of computers and Internet, this girl will be able to communicate with almost everyone, all over the world. She could blog, she could chat, she could write - heck, she may be able to make a living... all it takes is lessons in English.

There are members who does not want to go to school, members who are not filial, members who "lepak" their days away, members who are depressed and members who have financial, relationship and self esteemed problems. But really, compared to them, this mute/deaf girl is in a more desperate situation. Can you imagine living in a world of complete silence and no one is able to communicate with you unless they write Bahasa in a piece of paper? Can you imagine the loneliness and emptiness this girl feels every single day? If there is one person we can make a difference, it is to a person like her - and really, all it takes is a 30 minute/day English lesson! Something all of us can do, right?

There's this story that I read - I don't remember the source but I thought it was a talk given by Gandhi's grandson in Malaysia last year - anyway.. this man walked along a beach where thousands of starfishes were left stranded. He saw a little boy picking up a starfish, threw it back to the sea then picked up another. The man asked the boy why he's doing it as he's just wasting his time. There are tens of thousands of starfish to save. The boy picked up a starfish and said, "I made a difference to this one" and threw it into the water.

I hope Anne can make a difference to this girl.

Comments

  1. yes, great job there ! when the person herself also wants to improve, we - the capable shld render our assistance :) , she shld go and learn the lip languages. I am in the midst to check out some disabled information, and when i confirm the sources and information, I'll share with her, that will really make their community happy :), i am praying so hard that it is a positive news.....I'm so sad for my Teddy Bear, aiiiii - at times, i'm so hopeless - but he is there to inspire me to do what i can ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, is this 18 yrs old kid still schooling ? if yes , i have very good news , there is an allowances for this special kid. This year is $500, next year it is increased to $750 mthly, the school will bank into her account only :) this is some good fund for her. This is what i call some good initiative from government la or good use of my income taxes ...

    ReplyDelete
  3. ringgit ah ringgit! in the past you are so unlike this. you will rather talk abt your computer games leh. aiyohh what a shocker!

    are you ok or not? i am scared.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to