Audiologists Devote Time, Money to Helping Poor Hear
 Sheryl Tucker - Eagle Publications
| | Their mission was sponsored by the 33-year-old Starkey Hearing Foundation, which conducts 150 such missions each year. |
Dr. Amanda Silberer and Angi Martin-Prudent spent this year’s Valentine’s Day in Mexico, but it was hardly a vacation.
The two licensed audiologists and co-owners of Illinois' McDonough and Knox County Hearing Centers were fitting more than 200 adults and children with hearing aids in the center’s first hearing aid mission trip.
They traveled to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to distribute the hearing aids and batteries and train the patients on care and maintenance.
Silberer and Martin-Prudent started at 8 a.m. and finished after 6 p.m., and they said there were only two patients they could not help — because they had no residual hearing at all.
Patients ranged from 18 months to 104 years old, Martin said, noting that the 104-year-old walked all the way to the Marriott hotel where the fittings took place.
He wasn’t the only one using low-tech transportation. Martin and Silberer said some of the patients had left their homes the night before to walk to the bus. The patients learned about the mission through local service clubs such as the Rotary and Lions clubs.
“People traveled miles and miles and miles and waited hours and hours,” Martin-Prudent said.
Some even walked down mountains, Silberer said. After all, it was a special occasion.
“They were all dressed in their Sunday best,” Silberer said.
Their mission was sponsored by the 33-year-old Starkey Hearing Foundation, which conducts 150 such missions each year. Its cousin, Starkey Laboratories is the largest hearing instrument manufacturer in the world.
With 250 million hearing-impaired people worldwide, other organizations have joined the effort to help people in poverty-stricken countries hear, too.
Julia Roskamp, another licensed audiologist in Macomb, has assisted in several similar mission trips to various countries.
Her first, to Haiti in 1996, was with Maple Avenue Christian Church as part of a medical team while she owned a private practice.
When she arrived back in the United States, Roskamp didn’t think she would do it again, but the fulfillment it brought kept calling her back, and she took several more trips to Haiti.
“It kind of grew on me, I guess... thinking about all the people there and the friends I had made,” Roskamp said. “That was my ministry.”
She later joined ComCare International, a non-profit organization whose goal is to provide “solar-powered hearing aids for unreached people.”
She has been on mission trips to Nigeria, Cuba, Mexico, Ukraine and India with ComCare, and now is the executive director of the organization.
A big part of the lure of the mission trips, Roskamp said, was that ComCare is a Christian ministry that uses solar-powered hearing aids, which the organization developed with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1996.
The hearing aids she had been helping to distribute earlier were extremely expensive (around $1,800), susceptible to rust and general wear and tear and used batteries that needed replacing fairly often, which can be a problem in Third World countries. The solar powered hearing aids, she explained, are much more cost-efficient (around $110), more durable, unaffected by moisture and require only an hour of sunlight a day or two to charge.
Roskamp said she goes on about four trips a year, and she anticipates working with ComCare for the rest of her life.
“It’s something that gives me such joy,” Roskamp said.
Martin-Prudent and Silberer, who learned about the opportunity through their supplier, MicroTech (a division of Starkey Laboratories), had to donate $2,000 to the mission in order to participate. But that apparently was no impediment.
“We’ll definitely do it again,” Silberer said. |
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Vallarta Living | April 2006 
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