Gaza City

People in Palestine are experiencing hard economic and social conditions because of the ongoing Israeli assaults, including arbitrary shelling , assassinations, and  permanent closures that have brought about a high rise in the rate of disabled people rather than the cases resulted from diseases or heredity. All aforementioned actions have resulted in declining social  and economic conditions that restrain families from sustaining their basic needs. The UNRWA recent researches pointed out the 90% of the Palestinian families reduced their expenses on the fundamental needs. Therefore, they can not cover any extra expenses, so how come they could sustain the rehabilitation for their disabled independents.

It is noteworthy to mention that there are about 48022 disabled people in Gaza governorates , leaning on the field survey conducted by the NCCR in the year 2003-2004 for all Gaza governorates. It is noticeable also that rate of deaf children in the Gazan is high in comparison with the other Palestinian governorates whereas the number reached ???? for many reasons, including early marriage, lack of mothers' awareness, and relatives' marriage, while the middle ear otitis are regarded a major reason for deafness .

- Rehabilitating the deaf children under 5 years by training them and their mothers on SKI.HI program in preparation of integrating them in schools, and then into the local community.

100 Deaf Children

The children's segment is regarded one of the most marginalized groups in the society. We specifically refer to those deaf children who are still deprived of education due to the insufficient number of schools for the deaf children. In other words, there is only one school for deaf children in Gaza governorate, recognizing  the children above 5 years, and conducting the sign language. As a result, there are a large number of children on the waiting list , bearing in mind that they do not receive any educational or rehabilitative services. The status of five-year-children looks harder since they do not have a ray of hope to be recognized in any association because of their age.

- Children under 5 years are deprived of any sort of the special education , taking in consideration that this phase of life is the most important , whereas as the child is remarked of a high tendency for learning ,that he/she is need to early intervention in  rehabilitation and training. Further more, mothers are unable to assist their children , in the absence of awareness about  how to deal with them, especially when this child is the first deaf in the family.           

The project is grounded on providing didactic ,and rehabilitative services to the deaf children under 5 years old , depending on special plans for this segment of children , and using the way of comprehensive communication ( sign language and lips language ) , additionally to training the mothers on the sign language , and on how to deal with their children. Afterwards, the children are prepared to join the deaf schools . Reasons for the need of this project can be summarized as follows:

* The considerable rise in the number of the deaf children whom are detected early by the auditory clinic;

* Lack of special schools or associations that provide didactic, and rehabilitative services for the deaf children under 5 years old;

* Early intervention for the deaf children leads to rehabilitating them effectively that facilitates integrating them into the society; and

* Negligence of detected children without early intervention brings about delay in joining them to schools, and creates a big difficulty in rehabilitating them that could prevent integrating them into the society .

30.000 Euro

One Year