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“Now, she’s just a girl like all the others here”
A short film made by Sonova shows My, a little Vietnamese girl who wears a cochlear implant, strolling through a suburb of Ho Chi Minh City. The author Nadja Einzmann was caught up in My’s childish joy and thirst for adventure, and has transformed it into poetry.
“Only her mother can remember the time before any sound: the time when, for My, the rain fell unheard, the scooters out on the street coughed and spluttered in complete silence, and steps remained as soundless as all laughter, crying or screaming. She screamed a lot back then, had fits of rage, her mother occasionally recalls, but My has no memory of this. She has no desire to relive the silence in the eye of this hurricane of sounds, those inaudible, alien sounds. She only wants to remember the last few months, the last few weeks, today; she wants to stamp in puddles and listen to the rain drumming on the plastic tarpaulins. She wants to wave to every scooter that comes her way and stroke palm leaves until they begin to rustle.
Sometimes, her mother can hardly believe that My can now say “blink” and “blue” or “ship” and “short”, but it comes as no surprise to My. She is now five and has always been able to speak and has always heard, ever since she has been able to think, ever since she can remember, as if the time before the operation had never existed. Now, she’s just a girl like all the others here in Ho Chi Minh City, on the banks of the Saigon River. She can curl up with laughter when her girlfriends tell her a joke, she sometimes dances giddily through the streets to the music in her head, and she looks up when her mother calls her – as if all these things were nothing special at all.”
My, a five-year-old Vietnamese girl, was born with severe hearing loss. With support from the Global Foundation for Children with Hearing Loss, she was able to go to a specialist school, where she was given a hearing aid that was unfortunately not powerful enough for her to learn to talk. Thanks to a program jointly run by the Global Foundation for Children with Hearing Loss and the Hear the World Foundation, a Sonova Group initiative, My was fitted with a cochlear implant in Ho Chi Minh City in 2019. The little girl was speaking clearly and fluently just a few months after the operation.
With a population of more than seven million, Ho Chi Minh City is Vietnam’s largest conurbation and its economic heart.As in many low and middle-income countries, there is no health insurance or state support for cochlear implants here, and the devices themselves, the surgery, the long course of therapy and all the audiological services – not to mention the life-long cost of equipment maintenance – are beyond the reach of many families. The Global Foundation for Children with Hearing Loss and the Hear the World Foundation have thus joined forces to make it possible for ten disadvantaged Vietnamese children affected by severe hearing loss to hear and speak.
My has changed a lot since she has been wearing the cochlear implant, according to her mother. She used to get frustrated and angry very quickly, but now her character is blooming like never before; she can concentrate better in school and has found new friends.
My delights in the new sounds she can hear every day, like splashing water.
The author
The author Nadja Einzmann, who was born in 1974 and now lives in Frankfurt am Main, has published poetry and two volumes of short stories.Her tales explore feelings both great and small, and her sensitively crafted portraits shine a light not only on the lives of those around us but also on our own lives – and on life itself."It’s lovely to see how joyful and open to experience she is – she doesn’t seem to have been left with any scars from the time when she was so cut off from the world.”
