Deaf is a person who is not able to hear as well as someone with normal hearing. The causes of deafness can be congenital or acquired. Almost 5724 people in Indonesia is deaf, mild or severe, congenital or acquired. Especially in Malang, there is 2413 people who has this condition. One of the main impacts of hearing loss is on the individual’s ability to communicate with others. Spoken language development is often delayed in children with unaddressed hearing loss. They have a “special” way to communication that is call sign language. Unfortunately, not all of the people in Indonesia can do this. For many reasons, if we (as a medical student) can’t use sign language, it will be inhibit deaf to has a great health facilitation. That is why medical student of Brawijaya University held this project called “Breaking The Silence (BTS)”
In BTS, we have almost 110 volunteers. BTS held for two days. First day is the volunteer learn about sign languange , not only learn about sign language but also they learn about what is deafness, how can we prevent it, how can we care our ear and many more talk about ear. After they learn about sign languange and ear, they seperated into 8 SWG which they can learn more about sign languange. We learn about sign languange from Akar Tuli Malang, the biggest deaf community in Malang.
The second day is held in CFD Ijen Malang. In this day, we will have a long march with Akar Tuli Malang and more communities for celebrate International Deaf Day. After we have long march, we will stay in our booth. In this booth, we have two station, there are station to learn sign languange and to learn about how to care ear. After that, we have a petition to prove that Malang’s people is care for deaf.
We do hope that BTS could contribute to help in providing medical students to learn about sign languange and socialization to each other.