Ashok is a deaf boy who is twelve years old. He is an identical twin. Ashok lives with distant relativesss because his mother is now mentally retarded and bedridden and his father has to work. His mother tried to kill herself by jumping off the top of a 2 storey building.
Severely deaf since birth, Ashok could only hear loud noises. Everything else was indistinguishable. He couldn’t talk properly or listen in school and other children teased him. He misbehaved because he couldn’t hear the teachers. They beat him a lot. One of Bodhicitta Foundation’s social workers identified Ashok’s possible deafness when the family begged him for help. Although the family is lower middle class and owns a house and car (for work as a driver) they were not prepared to hash out a lot of money for a troublesome distant relative.
The hearing tests proved correct and a very kind Australian sponsor provided the hearing aids so that Ashok could cross the bridge between being cut off in his own world, to being able to communicate with others. Watching Ashok hear properly for the first time was amazing. We said his name and he smiled and turned around. His whole face lit up. We could shuffle pages and he could hear it. Now I think Ashok has a much brighter future. His family has agreed to put him in a better school after speech therapy.
Delinquent children often have reasons for the way they behave and now Ashok has support for his deafness.
Thank you to our kind sponsors, as Ashok really has recovered the gift of life.