Sussex firm's charity mission to school in Kenya

The local business, based in Chichester, Seaford and head office in the Bishopric, Horsham, recently completed a landmark charity mission to The Reverend Muhoro School for the Deaf in Kenya.

Managing director and audiologist Rob Davies led a team of seven to the school which is situated in Mukurewe-ini district in Nyeri, tucked into the foothills of Mount Kenya. South East Hearing Care is celebrating 20 years of association with the school and make annual visits, though this is the first for three and a half years due to restrictions caused by the Covid pandemic.

Reverend Muhoro school is a high school catering for the needs of the deaf community. It is a co-ed with a composition of 110 deaf boys, a similar number of deaf girls and 100 able hearing children from the local community.

Crawley based international hearing aid manufacturer Signia, assisted with donating more than 300 hearing aids and sent their head of audiology for the UK and Ireland, Julia Van Huysteen and technical support head, Allison Wright. Joining the group on this trip was audiologist Paula Cook from Aston hearing in Buckinghamshire and retired audiologist Vicki Skeels and retired GP Baber Yusuf.

In a country with no welfare and limited state funding, our annual visits are essential for the students to obtain a level of hearing to help them understand in lessons and enhance their education. Following the UK GCSE model, it is crucial the students get as significant a grade as possible so they may further their studies at community colleges. If they do well enough, their education is free.

Rob Davies said: “The school is very remote and rural, surrounded by subsistence farmers. There is little or no local industry apart from coffee and tea plantations where jobs are hard to come by. We firmly believe that education is the best tool we can equip the students with to break the cycle of poverty. There have been several successes over the years with some students gaining scholarships to Kenyan universities and a few have managed to get sponsorship for study in America.”

Every year, we try and improve the audiological facilities and from very humble beginnings when we donated a small audiometer in 2003, we have visited every year at least once with a Covid hiatus since our previous visit in 2019. Whilst at the school we always set a couple of days aside for a free ear clinic to the local community. This is very well attended and this year we saw 103 people for audiological and medical advice. For the first time we had coverage on a nationwide TV channel called Inooro. The publicity meant a week after our community clinic, we were still seeing people who had travelled from far and wide across Kenya. It is our mission to offer free services and hearing aids where needed to everyone who attends and throughout the year for the students at the school.

From one audiometer the facility at the school has grown to include a purpose-built audiometric room with sound booth for testing and a separate fitting room. The 2019 visit saw us start an ear mould making lab and trained the incumbent audio metrician Simon Kaiga. Puretone is a Kent based supplier of audiological equipment and kindly donated much need material for the ear mould lab, hearing aid tubing and ear impression material. The whole team brought various other stocks of batteries, light-pens, and otoscopes.