Ghada Abd El-Kader listens hard "I feel for this kind of suffering because I experienced it first hand. My father was hearing and speech impaired; my mother not. It was a tough life. And it has a lot to do with why, on graduating from the Faculty of Commerce, Cairo University, I chose to volunteer for the Egyptian National Association for the Hearing Impaired (ENAH), with encouragement from my father. We offer all kinds of services: medical, legal, social, educational, cultural, even religious. We also provide courses in sign language to help facilitate communication..." Thus Heba Adel, sign-language interpreter at ENAH, said. She went on to discuss divorce, one of the topics prioritised on the agenda of the most recent ENAH gathering: "Divorce is increasingly a phenomenon among the hearing impaired, because of low income, often the husband's failure to provide for his family for lack of work. Besides poverty and illiteracy, social problems in this community include infidelity, mistreatment of children, miscommunication..." The hearing impaired will have had a hard time receiving an education anyway. There are precious few institutions intended for them; and, unable to communicate with sounds, they are not admitted to most other schools, where staff are not qualified to deal with them. Another interpreter, Wael Samir -- also on the administrative board of ENAH -- sounded a note of hope when he pointed out that, all such difficulties notwithstanding, many hearing impaired people manage well enough with their careers of choice: "The most exemplary success story I know is that of Tamer Bahaaeddin Anis, an engineer, and the head of ENAH. With his amazing personality and incredible aptitude, he came out second from top in his class at the Faculty of Applied Arts, Helwan University. He had gone to a school for the hearing impaired before enrolling at the university. His case is somewhat different, though, as he was not born deaf but became more and more hard of hearing as he grew up. Now the head of the engineering department at an oil company, he nonetheless demonstrates how the hearing impaired can manage just like anybody else..." Khaled Abdel-Razeq Hussein, a graduate of a vocational secondary school, is another bright example Samir gives: he invented vibrating alarm clocks out of inexpensive material for use by the hearing impaired. Being an NGO, however, Samir adds, ENAH faces obstacles of its own: "The main problem is our low budget, because we receive very little subsidy whether from the government or from people. We've submitted a proposal to Cairo Governor Abdel-Azim Wazir to provide us with a piece of land on which to build a services centre. We are still waiting for a response." The second main obstacle is isolation: the organisation is not very well-known, and is located in an isolated area; besides, it is rather weak on public relations: "We don't have the support of either the Ministry of Social Affairs nor the media. At the same time there aren't many media programmes or news produced with the hearing impaired in mind." Anis agrees: "We should distinguish a true hearing impairment from partial hearing difficulties, because the former community receives no care from the government at all." Neither, he says, are there instructive programmes to help parents deal with a hearing impaired child, nor clubs or civic frameworks for activism: "Since we don't have a special educational system for the hearing impaired, they are too often deprived of a university education, as they fail the medical examination required. Equipment is expensive and what little of it available is of bad quality. And the media is, on the whole, completely passive." Since founding ENAH in 1997, with help from some 80 people who were interested, in a small apartment in Maadi, Anis has worked non-stop, earning his organisation the Ismail Habib Award for volunteer work in March 2002. "We have also participated in workshops in conferences in Syria, the UAE, Lebanon and Tunisia, and worked with the Arab League to produce a unified Arabic Dictionary of Sign Language. We also managed to translate a whole book into sign language. All of which is by way of helping achieve equality."
