LIONS CLUBS INTERNATIONAL MULTIPLE DISTRICT 105, BRITISH ISLES AND IRELAND: USED HEARING EQUIPMENT PROJECT: HIGHLIGHTS OF 2004

5 January. Here we go again starting a new year with 200 hearing aids and over 1200 batteries posted to Dr Pam Douglas in Settle, N Yorkshire. She is off to Malawi in a couple of weeks, to the Mua School for the Deaf.
7 January. 400 hearing aids on their way to the Ukraine but to via two routes and to two destinations. Two hundred to our Lion friends in Eu, France. Then 200 more to Councillor John Fox in Peterborough who is taking them to Vinnitsa next month. He is actually taking more than that for us but I will tell you that later.
10 January. 200 more aids are on their way to Brazil and Dr Harold Norwood, who works with the very poor.
10 January. Dr Gemma Ward, up in Sunderland and the Associate Specialist Community Child Health, asks us if we would like four of her old audiometers. John Shipley, the willing President of the Sunderland Lions is leaping round to her door in case she changes her mind!
16 January. My wife collects her first NHS digital hearing aid from our local Conquest Hospital and as a bonus we collect from Carol Gupwell a Maico audiometer and an otoscope. That made it a rewarding visit!
19 January. Mrs Leveritt from Bury St Edmunds has an urgent request from a friend in Albania for a hearing aid. Alas there is no further technical information but she is desperate to help so we send an old personal amplifier. A thank you letter a week later says that this should do the trick. We certainly hope so.
30 January. The audiometer and otoscope are not clogging up the garage for long! Francis Attah, one of John Brantuos teachers, is heading back to Ghana, if he can get on the plane with excess baggage! He has 200 hearing aids, a dozen reading spectacles and 600 batteries to carry as well.
5 February. Two deliveries today and both were anonymous. A single hearing aid in an envelope with a Tyneside postmark. The other in a big Jiffy bag, containing about a hundred aids, so obviously from a hospital. This one had a Redhill postmark. Thanks to whoever sent them all, they all count!
9 February. It was the Lions Convention for those of us who live in the south east of England. As it was in Chichester, it gave me the opportunity to collect the hearing equipment sent there. Among the haul were splendid contributions from Bill Jones and the Ormskirk Lions as well as from the reticent but productive Lion Collier and his COGS. Thats Caterham Oxted and Godstone to the unenlightened! Thank you one and all, even if your packet was anonymous.
9 February. Bernice, my long suffering wife and I are of to see Lion Dr Hugh Thom at work in the Philippines on the 13th so there will be an interlude. However, we have made an appeal for