Sunday Times 2
Donation of Hearing Aids
View(s):Priya Jayasinghe of D. S. Jayasinghe Opticians (Pvt) Ltd., recently gifted five WIDEX digital hearing aids worth Rs. 1 million for the use of needy children at the Centre for Education of Hearing Impaired Children (CEHIC), at Dalugama, Kelaniya. The gift was accepted on their behalf by Rev. Sr. Greta Nalawatta, Founder and Director of CEHIC.
The Centre has been in existence for 32 years. It offers all its services free of charge to hearing impaired children and uses the auditory – verbal method of education which enables the children to hear and speak with the help of hearing aids and intensive speech and language therapy. It runs a pre-school at Dalugama and the children are integrated into the mainstream school educational system at the school-going age. The integrated children are given extra classes at CEHIC in the national curriculum and prepared for their GCE ‘O’ level and ‘A’ level exams.
To date about 500 children have been successfully integrated into schools in Sri Lanka and three CEHIC students have graduated from university while five more are currently undergraduates.