I cannot begin to describe how it felt when our darling daughter, Alisha, was diagnosed as deaf. The grief and despair were overwhelming. We didn't know what it meant. We thought that she would never be able to hear, speak, participate in a conversation, listen to music, sing, hear us say her name or call us when she needed us.

We ordered every book we could find on deafness. Most of them made me cry (and cry and cry) and then I read one with a chapter about auditory verbal therapy which gave clear answers to our many questions and gave us hope. We managed to track down Jacqueline Stokes, then one of only 2 auditory verbal therapists in this country. Alisha started auditory verbal therapy when she was three and a half months old. By the time she was two she had "graduated", although she was not at all impressed by this and organised a demonstration (by her soft toys) to register her disapproval at the scaling down of her "playdates" at Auditory Verbal UK (AVUK).

I knew we had reached a point I could not have imagined when, on a flight, after several hours of non-stop talking I had to tell Alisha that there was to be no more talking or there would be big trouble. As I write she is singing herself to sleep. All we wanted was that she should be given the tools to fulfil her own potential, AVUK gave us those tools. Alisha is now in a mainstream school, participates fully and has no trouble keeping up (she also does not stop talking and sings beautifully). That would not have been possible for her without auditory verbal therapy.

AVUK was set up to provide AV therapy to deaf babies and to train auditory verbal therapists so that all deaf children might have the opportunity to develop age appropriate spoken language by the  age of 5. The reason we are running is that AVUK urgently needs funding to get through a difficult period. Please help us continue AVUK's work so that all deaf children can have the opportunity that Alisha has had. 

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