My journey as a language teacher in Suniye has been very good. My teaching career started with working as a teacher in a private school at the Nehru Academy. While I was working there I got married and discontinued working, as the school was very far. I missed my work and wanted to get back to teaching. It is during this time that I got to know about a Nursery Teachers Training Course (NTT) . I immediately joined the course which was for two years. After completing the course, I worked at the IIT nursery school for 6 months. Here I worked with very young mainstream children. I enjoyed my work and loved being with children. While I was working at the IIT nursery school my supervisor from the NTT institute told me about SUNIYE and its requirement of a language teacher. I wanted to know about Suniye so I visited the organization and met the supervisor. Work sounded challenging but it interested me. So I decided to join Suniye.
In the beginning I found it very difficult to work with the children as they had hearing loss which made communication difficult with them. There was a delay in speech and language due to the loss. I used all my TLM I made for my nursery class to teach children which really helped. I was given certain skills by the speech therapist to work with these children. The children were like any other child but required intensive speech and language therapy for helping them to hear and speak. The work was very different from my previous work and required great amount of effort and planning. Each child’s loss was different and each child’s intervention was also different. But I was determined to work with them and bring about a positive change in the child’s life. Slowly I learnt the skills and formed a good rapport with the children which made it very easy for me to work with children.
Around this time I got a job offer from a Govt school. All my family members wanted me to join the Govt. job as it has many facilities. I was very confused and discussed this with the supervisor at Suniye. She just told me one thing that at Suniye you are imparting skills to children who are struggling and are unable to be part of the mainstream. Very few teachers will ever get this kind of opportunity. I went back home and thought about it and decided to stay on. My family was also with me in this decision. I get a lot of satisfaction in working at Suniye as it’s just not about teaching them, it is also about helping to build their self confidence and self esteem. It is really heartening to see our children join the mainstream schools and become independent. Now the aim of my life is to help more and more hearing impaired children to speak, hear and read and become a contributing member of the society. I feel blessed being a part of Suniye support school for hearing impaired children.
ervices provided by the Suniye.
- Hearing test by paying a nominal fee
- Regular counselling session for parents
- Training of parents to work with their children.
- Maintenance and repair facility of hearing aids.
- Provide aided and unaided audiogram
- Individual and group therapy for children.
