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1 January. We are off and running with two lovely boxes of hearing aids from Crawley Hospital here in sunny Sussex. And we know there are more coming from Southend.
21 January. Thirty hearing aids and some 100 batteries are off to Nepal to replace the ones apparently “lost.
31 January. We have collected a splendid haul of hearing equipment and masses of batteries. The batteries come from RNID and from Lion Peter Weatherill, who bought them on our behalf with the appeal fund money.
8 February. A most welcome 228 hearing aids arrive from Frankland Prison. They have sent another 229 to Romania.
9 February. At our Lions convention for clubs in the south east of England I pick up a mighty haul, 10kg of hearing aids and some batteries. These were delivered from our colleagues in Chichester.
11 February. Off to Sri Lanka for our golden wedding orgy of fun and frolic, as indeed, it turns out to be. We take 500 hearing aids for the Wellawatta West Lions Club and the Colombo General Hospital. Also we take blood sugar monitoring kits sufficient for testing 500 patients. A bag of ballpoint pens and sweets and lollipops are also crammed in the suitcase.
On our return. We visited a care home in Colombo for teenage girls, where we found that a sixteen-year-old lass is wearing one of our donated hearing aids. On a Sunday we attended a hearing clinic for villagers bussed in from 200km away and fed breakfast by the monks at a Buddhist monastery. The ENT staff and Lions had given up their Sunday to help these people out. The Wellawatta Lions had set this all up and were on hand with drinks.
The friendships we have formed with ordinary Sri Lankans and the work done by Lions there is quite fantastic. Thank you Wellawatte.
27 February. Our chums in Parcelforce have the 10kg of hearing aids in the van and off to Frankland.
14 March. 250 hearing aids are on their way to the Ukraine the round about way, via our Lions Friends, Hervé and Anne-Marie Mathieu-Bloise, just over the Channel from us in Eu, Normandy. Oh and there are 500 batteries as well.
15 March. A box of 300 hearing aids from Frankland Prison arrives, just when they are needed. Well-done Steve, Tina and the team.
18 March. Well would you believe it, 20 years after this Project started we have gone full circle. A nurse from Mansfield called Dorothy is going back to visit her home next month in Gweru, Zimbabwe. She has requested hearing aids for the Jairos Jiri Home there. While visiting the Lions Club of Gweru in 1988 I was asked for hearing aids for Jairos Jiri! Words cannot describe how I feel but we will start with 100 and 200 batteries and see how it goes.
27 March. Four items of equipment, a speech trainer, tympanometer, audiometer and analyser, are off to our friends Trico, who will ship them to Colombo South Hospital in Sri Lanka for us.
31 March. On the advice of the audiologists at the Conquest Hospital I ask the Hearing equipment suppliers Pure tone if they could sell us mould material for Zimbabwe. The call was answered immediately with a donation of enough material to make more than we needed. We are so grateful for this wonderful gesture
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