Deaf Aid Society Site Visit Report

Site Visit Report to Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf (SKID), Bangalore.

Visited on 2nd January 2001 by Shamik and Maithreyi


SKID is located just off Airport Road, about 15 minutes from the Bangalore Airport. This used to be on the outskirts of Bangalore but with the recent explosive growth in the city, it is now in the heart of a bustling portion of the city called the Diamond District.

We arrived there at about 10am and spent about 3 hours there. The school is housed in a solid 3 storeyed building on land that was donated to them in the 50's. There is a good amount of space around the school for a playground and a park. It immediately gives a feeling of an institution run with a lot of caring.

We spent 30 minutes in a meeting talking to Wing Cmdr (retd) Raza Shirazi, Ms. Asha Dey and Ms Krishna Basu, all members of the Executive Committee of the school. We spoke about the school's history, it's successes, their use of the Asha funds for drinking water and sanitation systems, and the difficulties they are currently facing with the running of the school.

For more information on the details of the school, you can see their first project proposal and the first site visit report written up by Mr Janardhan (<http://www.ashanet.org/seattle/proj/DeafAid/index.htm>). I won't cover that info, I'll just talk about our site visit specifically.

We then met the principal Ms. Margaret Joseph and went with her for a tour around the school. 

We first went to the Kindergarten class. There were 12 children in the class. They were all seated in a semicircle around the teacher (Ms. Manjula) so they could all read her lips and see her gestures. There were 2 students from IIM-Bangalore who were with her that day as volunteers. We spent quite some time in the class and saw how dedicated Manjula was to her job. New students entering the school start out in this class so in many ways this is the hardest class to teach. When we entered, the kids were learning to write. Manjula showed us how the children were also beginning to lip read. How they were beginning to recognize their own names. That shook me - these children did not know their own name before they came to the class. Manjula called out a few names and the children all responded. Then she turned them around so they were facing the opposite wall and called out their names. None of them could of course hear anything. There was one child in the class excitedly communicating something to his neighbor in sign language. We found out that every morning when the children come in, they get to share their experiences from the last evening with their friends. This particular child had seen a movie the previous day and so was going around signing the story to all his friends. There was another very bright child with spiky hair on the right side of the room who crossed her hands together and gestured towards us. Manjula explained that she was asking us if we would be her friends. Her eyes lit up when we signed back to her that we were indeed her friends. Ms. Joseph then told us that this child was 8 years old - the child had been so malnourished, she looked like she was 5. She had grown up neglected in a very poor family who had ignored her deafness. Her uncle had then taken her under his wing and brought her to the school. The school had then found a nearby home for her and here she was.

We then moved on to a 4th std. class. The children were in a history class when we entered. The class was again small - about 10 children, so the teacher/student ratio is pretty good. One child gestured to us and the teacher explained that he was asking Maithreyi her name. After she responded, he asked if he could spell it on the board. From his lip reading, he went up to the board and wrote out "Mythree". 

The lunch bell rang right after that. The children all have lunch together in the hallways and in the lunchroom in the school. We saw a lot of the older children chatting with each other animatedly through sign language and it was a joy to see them communicate so eloquently with each other.

The school is giving the children vocational training also. We visited the computer room, saw samples of the handicrafts, pottery and tailoring work done by the students. The pottery teacher's only complaint was that all the kids seemed to be deserting their pottery work to go play with the computers :).

Wing Cdr Shirazi also took me up to the roof. I saw the rooftop tank built with Asha funds, the pump downstairs pushing up the water and the state of the old AquaGuard system they had replaced for drinking water. 

The school also has a room with some machines in a soundproof chamber that measure the residual hearing in the child so that they can adjust the hearing aids correctly. When a child first starts using the hearing aid, they are not aware of how to set the volume on the aid and so the machine is invaluable in determining this. The school gets good quality hearing aids at a subsidized rate from Siemens.

Overall, everything we saw suggested quality. The teachers were careful and dedicated. They have all had special training in teaching the hearing impaired. The children were vibrant. There was a curiosity in their eyes, a keen desire to learn and to communicate with visitors which showed that the school is not stifling them. The executive committee is committed and they are trying their best to go out and raise the desperately needed funds and at the same time provide the children with a quality education. For instance, they just got GE to build a park on one side of the premises.

This was my first site visit and I was truly overwhelmed. In the past I have often wondered about the effectiveness of Asha's site visit policy. How much can one really learn by just visiting a project for just a few hours? Surely anyone can pretend to be doing a great job and pull wool over the naive NRI visitor's eyes. These were my opinions until I did this site visit. Luckily, for anyone who has similar doubts, there is a simple solution - just do a site visit.

We met a lot of incredible people that morning. The teachers all had dedication shining in their eyes. The children, with their wonderfully lustrous eyes, participating in the process of learning, enjoying being in the classrooms, reaching out to us and asking us to be their friends - these were amazing experiences.

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