“I may not speak well, but because you are with me, mom, I am very intelligent, my friends love me and tell me that my smile is beautiful.” This is what Zaid told his mom to thank her for her presence. The ten-year-old boy with hearing impairments has greatly improved his ability to communicate since attending the EHIS center in Aleppo.
He has lively eyes Zaid, ten years old and attends the fourth grade. Since birth he has hearing problems. His family noticed this when the baby was just eleven months old; And it was a new thing to deal with because none of them had had difficulties of this kind. At the age of three, Zaid put on a hearing aid for the first time. Now he is followed at the EHIS center in Aleppo, supported by the Syria Emergency Program “Seeds of Hope”: and it is here that Zaid began to improve and speak better, to pronounce better word after word. The mother follows him constantly, always committed to ensuring that her son has a life like that of all other children: “At first I had difficulties, but then we began to understand each other even without speaking”. The understanding between mother and child also reaches where words do not arrive.
When Zaid was young and not yet of school age, he did not perceive any diversity in himself. When it was time to attend a public school, among other children without hearing difficulties, Zaid began to wonder why others spoke and he did not; Because he wore a hearing aid and the others didn’t. In short, he started feeling the existence of something strange, and this caused him a lot of suffering.
Crossing the threshold of the EHIS center, the perception of that diversity disappeared because he met people and children with his identical problem and began to make friends. Says the mother: “The way the teachers behaved with Zaid, and the way they improved my communication with him made this easier.”
The school workers asked the child what he wanted to say to his mother, this was his answer: “I may be weak or not speak well, but because you are with me, mom, I am very intelligent, my friends love me and tell me that my smile is beautiful. Thank you, Mom.”
