Who is Gerdie Kuik, and what does she do?
A couple of weeks ago, Gerdie Kuik visited us. Our audiologist Guido Makker invited her to talk about hearing-impaired children. He asked this because he is travelling to Nepal in March to help many hearing-impaired children there. Gerdie Kuik worked at the Bertha Muller School in Utrecht. Here, among other things, she did a lot of audiological care for hearing-impaired children. Gerdie is now specialized in audiometry in children and knows better than anyone what impact it has to offer hearing aids to children at an early stage of hearing loss. She talks more about it in this interview.
Gerdie explains that good hearing is crucial for children, not only so they can hear better, but also for their development. ”When a child cannot hear well, they start missing things like different pitches or sounds of words. As a result, the child doesn’t catch some things or catches them wrong,” says Gerdie. So children need to hear well, but far from everyone can afford an aid like a hearing aid. And many children never get the chance to have their hearing tested at all, so they often don’t know if they have hearing loss. Think of children in developing countries like Nepal, who often spend their entire childhood with poor hearing and suffer developmental delays that will affect them later on.
Our aim is to counter this by taking a trip to Nepal in March with two Online-Hearingaids.com employees and an ENT doctor. Together with some local activists, they will organize a hearing week there. During that hearing week, they will go to a different village in the Chitwan province every day. The locals are urged to come forward if they have hearing problems. Our hearing care professionals will then take hearing tests, fit hearing aids and donate hearing aids to the locals. All this is made possible thanks to the customers of Online-Hearingaids.com. In fact, for every order, we donate to the Child Welfare Organisation Nepal (CWON) foundation who try to improve life in the poorest areas of Nepal.
