Devang Dalal has been awarded a Humanitarian award by the prestigious American Academy of Audiology.
When the entire world was celebrating the International Women's day on Thursday, a Santacruz based speech therapist was working among the 'special children' in government special schools to uplift them and bring them into the mainstream from the 'sign languages' of special schools.
It is because of efforts like these, which she has been carrying on since the past decade that Devang Dalal has been awarded a Humanitarian award by the prestigious American Academy of Audiology. She is the first Indian to receive this award which is conferred to a person for doing exemplary work for the hearing impaired children.
The American Academy of Audiology was constituted in 1998 and at present, has more then 11,000 speech therapist and audiologist from all over the world.
The organisation seeks high degree of professional development, education, research, and increased public awareness of hearing and balance disorders. Dalal, will be conferred the award at Boston in USA on March 27-30 and is expected to be honoured by around 10,000 experts from across the globe.
Dalal, at present, is trying to help around 250 special kids of the three schools she has adopted in Mumbai and one in Gujarat.
Most of these kids come from poor families and don't have enough resources to get a proper digital hearing aid devices.
"My aim is to bring all the children with hearing impairment into the main stream and turn them into normal and efficient human beings," says Dalal while working on one of her patient, who has been recently been taken by a multinational company to work in their web-designing team.
Dalal tries to arrange for philanthropists, so that the right kind of hearing aid could be provided to these kids for a very nominal fees, or in some cases, free of cost, which is otherwise very expensive.
According to Dalal, each of these kids who go to special schools can be brought into the main stream. "But its not simple. It requires a lot of efforts from the teachers and parents to teach them the correct method of handling these kids. It is important to communicate with people with hearing and speech disorder in a similar way we speak with normal people,” she adds.
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