 Listen Up!September, 2010Inside this Issue | ||||||||
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Discussion on AgingThe 3rd Annual Healthy Aging Conference—Bringing Together Family Caregivers, Health & Human Service Providers and Senior Citizens will be held at the Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls on 10/20/10 from 8:00am—3:00pm. Registration Fee: $30 providers, $15 family caregivers & 65 and older are free. The Keynote Speaker is Susan Wehry, MD; Geriatric Psychiatrist;Clincial Associate, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Vermont College of Medicine. Saratoga Vital Aging Network and the Saratoga County Office for the Aging/NY Connects are co-sponsoring In My House, About Me, Without Me at the Holiday Inn in Saratoga Springs on 10/20/10 from 8:30am—3:30pm. A conference for the elderly, their families, service providers, builders, health care professionals, community planners and government officials to engage in a community conversation on diverse pathways to alternative living options for the elderly. The Keynote Speaker is Paula Span, author of “When the Time Comes.” Registration is $25 and includes lunch & copy of “When the Time Comes.” | ||||||||
Sign-Up for Fabulous FriendsThe “Fabulous Friends with Flying Fingers” sign language troupe is open to all children age 7-14 that are willing to learn a variety of Christmas songs in sign language to perform at various events throughout the Tri-County community ex: Festival of Trees, South Glens Falls Holiday Parade, and Lions Clubs, etc. The performance schedule will be finalized and distributed to the participants soon after the class starts. The goal of the troupe is to learn basic sign language and promote deaf culture awareness within the community. This is a 10 week program plus performances. A brief meeting with be held for parents/guardians on September 21st. Please contact the Association for the Hearing Impaired at 761-0554 for more information.
To sign up, either call our office or register on line! | ||||||||
Home Schoolers Sign Language ClassClasses are Starting in September. Don’t Delay SIGN UP TODAY!!
For additional information contact the AFTHI office at 761-0554 or office@afthi.org. You can now register online! |
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ASL Classes Start Sept 20th, 6:30-8:30
WEDNESDAYS Beginning- 9/22/10 Level I Beginners Class/Refreshers Classes are 10 weeks. The Class fee is $40—Non Members $25—Members If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at (518) 761-0554 or E-Mail us at office@afthi.org. You can now also sign up online! |
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The Show Must Go On!The AFTHI will be at the Charles Wood Theater to make FM receivers available at the following shows:
And did you know that sign language interpreters are available at the New York State Fair! To learn more, visit www.fadeinterpreting.com. | ||||||||
‘Ears to You CafeReprinted from the hear (Hearing Endeavor for the Capital Region) news—July/August 2010 edition Save the Date for the 'Ears to You Cafe...Audio Waves and Java on September 30th! If you or someone that you know has difficulty hearing when watching TV or when talking on the telephone, this presentation will provide an overview of options to help. Hearing Loss Association of America—Albany Chapter will present a panel of speakers to include Drs. Andrew Kovalovich and Sharon Rende along with representatives from Landmark Technologies and Captel who will review the newest listening technologies and demonstrate how they work. Opportunities to test out and try a variety of listening aids will be available. The meeting will take place at the Colonie Library from 6:00—8:30 PM on Thursday, September 30th. (If there is interest, the AFTHI will do our best to facilitate car-pooling from our Queensbury office) | ||||||||
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and YouThe Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires, among other things, all hotels, motels and other public facilities to be equally accessible to guests who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. ADA requires them to equip guest rooms, upon request and at no charge, with visual alerting devices that alert you to sounds like door knocking, incoming phone calls, and smoke alarms. Rooms should also have telephone amplifiers, text telephones (TTY/TTD) and closed caption decoders for television sets. Most hotels are complying with the ADA for their customers’ convenience and patronage. They want to ensure that all Inform your hotel/motel that you need assistive devices when you make your reservation. If a hotel is unable to meet your needs, ask to speak to a manager. If you are not provided the equipment and feel the hotel is in violation of the ADA, you may choose to contact the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Office on ADA at (202) 514-0383 TTY/TTD or (202) 514-0301 Voice, for assistance. | ||||||||
Life’s Bountiful BuffetFrom ALDA News—Summer 2010. Reprinted with the permission of ALDA (Association of Late-Deafened Adults). Marcia Corliss Johnson (aka “Marcie”) is a retired French and English teacher currently living with her retired husband and artist son in upstate New York (Queensbury). She enjoys travel, swimming, walking, reading, writing and spending time at the family cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks. Struggling with severe progressive hearing loss for the past decade, she is in the process of reinventing herself as a teacher of ASL, and she is also at work on a novel about a late-deafened detective. Marcie can be reached at: teacher.323@hotmail.com Note to Listen Up! Readers: Marcie taught the AFTHI’s Level I and Level II classes during the past Winter/Spring Shortly after I started to lose my hearing, I began having a recurring dream. I was at a sumptuous buffet, with all my favorite foods spread out in front of me. I picked up my plate and got in line eagerly. But whenever I started to help myself to something, a waiter appeared and whisked it away before I could take any of it. As the waiter removed dish after dish, I became hungrier, and eventually, panic set in. Finally when all five or six items had been taken away, I helped myself to what was left and took my plate back to my table. It didn’t require a genius to figure out the significance of this dream. As a recently retired French teacher with a progressive hearing loss, I saw so many of my plans for retirement slipping away. I had always wanted to live abroad and learn new languages, but with my severe hearing impairment, that dream now seemed impossible. I had always dreamed of learning to play the flute, but now I couldn’t even hear the sweet sound of that instrument, much less learn to make music on it. I had always planned to continue to teach on a volunteer or part-time basis, but now the everyday noise and bustle of a classroom had turned all speech into an indecipherable gibberish. I had dreamed of taking up freelance journalism, a job I had enjoyed in my younger days, but was unable to use a telephone or conduct an interview. What was I going to do in all of the empty months and years that stretched ahead? My world seemed to have shrunk down to a very small place, and with it, my life’s possibilities. I retreated to my books and my computer, my patio garden, and my captioned television and videos, avoiding social situations and trying not to think about the future because such thought were just too painful. I even began to dread going to bed at night, fearing that dream I found so upsetting, which I continued to have with increasing frequency. Finally, after a vivid night of dreaming, I decided it was time to face my fears. I came to the conclusion that there must be more to that dream than I had first perceived, that my subconscious might actually be trying to tell me something. So rather than trying to shut the dream out of my conscious mind, I began to think about it more carefully. What was so fearful about that dream, really? Yes, in it I had experienced frustration and disappointment, but in the end, I had enough left to sustain me. Surely there was a lesson in that. And as I began to think about the dream further, another realization dawned on me: who eats everything at one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, anyway? Sure, if you are a food lover, as I am, you are tempted to pile you plate high with every item you can fit onto it. The first few bites are always wonderful. But as you plow your way through all of that food, your appetite diminishes and you find the rest doesn’t taste quite as good as you thought it would. Eventually you stop eating, leaving half of it on your plate. What is so tempting about a buffet, whether literal or metaphorical, is the seemingly endless possibilities. Yet in the end, the simple truth is that we can’t try them all. There isn’t enough time or appetite to sample everything. Sooner or later we have to choose. When I had looked ahead to my retirement, I had savored all of the possibilities. I could travel for years if I wanted to! I could live oversees! I could train for a new career, get a new degree, start a business, write a novel, become a full-time volunteer, remodel my house, create a garden, learn a new language. But was I really going to do ALL of those things? Realistically, probably not. Eventually I would choose just two or three of these projects, and, because there are only so many hours in the day and so many years in the lifetime, I would reluctantly let the rest go. Did it really matter so very much, then, that there might be fewer items on my buffet table than on someone else’s. So long as there were satisfying choices to pick from, did it really matter if there were a few or a few hundred? Wasn’t the important thing, after all, to find something worthwhile to do, and to throw oneself into that pursuit with passion and enthusiasm? To make whatever the choice we have fulfilling, life-affirming, joyful experiences? As time went on, I discovered that I also had some new choices I hadn’t considered before. I began to study a new language, American Sign Language, taking classes whether they were offered, and learning about Deaf culture. Eventually, I began to teach again, facilitating a small class in beginning sign language at the local Association for the Hearing Impaired. I traveled across the country to conferences on hearing loss and met some wonderful, caring people and listened to amazing, inspirational speakers. I began to write again, this time about hearing loss and disability issues. Recently, I had the buffet dream once again, but it ended differently. This time, as I followed the waiter down the buffet table as he wisked away dish after dish, I turned a corner—and I saw, laid out in tasty array, a whole new set of dishes I hadn’t noticed before, and no one is preventing me from helping myself to them. And sitting at a table at the end of the buffet was a group of brand new friends, folks I had met at ALDA and through my ASL classes, people I would never had known if it hadn’t been for the loss of my hearing. And as I gratefully took my seat among them, plate in hand, I realized that it was HERE, among such a beautiful people, that life’s buffet is truly the most bountiful. To learn more about ALDA, Inc., please contact the organization: Association of Late-Deafened Adults, Inc. (ALDA) E-Mail: info@alda.org |
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AFTHI On-The-GoThe Association for the Hearing Impaired, Inc. believes that community outreach is an integral part of service to the community. In each edition of Listen Up! we will list and describe opportunities that the AFTHI has had to present to community organizations, participate in special events such as Health Fairs, and/or discuss and share information about our programs and services with large groups of people. We will list outreaches that will take place during the next month/four weeks, as well as activities/events we have already confirmed our attendance at:
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Listen Up! is the newsletter of the Association for the Hearing Impaired, Inc., Bennet F. Driscoll, Jr., Executive Director. Listen Up! is published monthly and made available in print and on-line editions. If you wish to change your subscription, please visit the links provided below, or call the Association's office at 518-761-0554. |
