Hearing Comes to Macha

I am so excited that I must share!  As you know I am a speech therapist by trade and over the past year and a half here in Macha, Zambia I have been trying to “start” to provide speech therapy to children.  As part of that endeavor I have dealt with several children with hearing disabilities. While I am not an audiologist by training, SLPs and audiologists start their training together in grad school prior to branching off into their separate fields.  While in the US over the holidays, I picked up a screening audiometer from Samaritan’s Purse and brought it back to use to screen people’s hearing.  So far, I’ve gone into 2 secondary schools (Macha Girls and Francis Davidson) along with the team from the eye clinic so that we could assess the student’s vision and hearing.  Unfortunately, once a failed hearing screening was determined the closest place to get a full hearing test would be to go to the capital, Lusaka, 6-7 hours away.  This is a costly trip for many here in this area.  I usually would have the student go to the outpatient clinic at the hospital to be seen by a doctor to rule out an ear infection or wax build up etc… but after that there was nothing to do for them here.

Yesterday, I had a meeting with 2 men (Zambians) from Beit-Cure Hospital BCH (in Lusaka), who are working to establish hearing screening and testing sites all over the Central and Southern (where we are) provinces in order to allow people more access to these services!!!!! That is such wonderful news!!!  I can’t put enough exclamation marks behind that. They have already selected 36 nurses and clinical officers (like a physician’s assistant) from across the Southern Province and have trained them to perform hearing screenings and minor procedures (wax removal, ear drops, etc…).  These people are scattered across the province at hospitals, rural health clinics, etc…  Unfortunately, Macha Mission Hospital somehow got skipped in this process.  So, these two men came to visit and find out what was already available here: me with my little screening audiometer.  I am very relieved to say that they will be selecting two nurses/COs from MMH to be trained and equipped to take care of the needs of those with hearing issues.  Yay! Praise the Lord!

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The second part that is so very exciting and the reason they were here in the south was to check in on a new hearing booth that BCH is building in Choma (1 ½ hours away where we do our shopping).  SO CLOSE!  The building of the booth is complete and should be equipped and running within 2 weeks (which here means about 6 I’m guessing but still)!!!!  They will be able to do full hearing tests and have someone there to assess whether they qualify for a hearing aid.  Now if someone in Macha is found to have failed a hearing screening, they will only need to go to Choma to receive further evaluation.  Wow! That is wonderful.

BCH only services children 18 and under so that is the population that will be focused on through this program.  If you have heard of CURE hospitals (I think mostly in Africa) based out of the US, they are running this hospital.  They chose to honor BEIT Trust (UK based) for building the hospital for them and named this hospital after both.  They have 2 hearing screening booths and 3 audiology techs at BCH.  Livingstone Hospital (in Southern Province about 4 hours away) has 2 booths, 2 techs and 1 ENT surgeon.

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One of the things that I observed when doing the screenings was what seemed to me to be the high number of teenagers with a failure in one ear.  My guess is that as children they had multiple untreated ear infections (parents often don’t take their children to be seen when they’re sick) which resulted in a lot of scarring on the ear drum and loss of hearing.  In the US a surgeon would put in tubes to prevent this from happening.  When I asked about this procedure, they said that it can be done but is very expensive and rare.  They didn’t seem to understand what I meant by “tubes” initially but eventually, after much explanation, realized that what I was actually talking about was a “grommet” surgery! Lol.  You certainly have to learn new lingo here or the conversation goes nowhere.

So, all in all it was a wonderful visit.  We decided to, along with the eye clinic screening staff, plan an outing in the next quarter to see how to best educate and facilitate this kind of help to the local people.  I’m excited for what’s to come and to have Zambians trained to do the hearing side of things so that I can focus more on the speech and language side.

They also gave me the contact information for the 1 speech therapist in Lusaka (I am now the 2^nd SLP in Zambia-and we are both American), 1 speech therapy tech (BCH) and the 1 speech therapist in training (UTH) as well as those who will be running the hearing center in Choma.  Sometime when I go to Lusaka I will check out their set up there and see how they run things.

On the speech and language side of things, BCH has run a 10 day speech training for 13 SLP assistants (specifically selecting nurses who work in “mother and child health” under age 5) in order for them to identify any children needed speech and language evaluations.  I am relieved to find these allies in the field.

There was mutual joy within the meeting to have found each other and be able to join efforts together to better serve the children of Macha and beyond.

God is good!

Blessings

Maggie Roth