Update from Alison
It’s July, school’s out for summer, there are BBQs on the beach, picnics in the park and mayhem on the motorways.
Why not dig out your old stripey deckchair, pour yourself a lemonade and read our latest news.
Staying with the holiday theme, volunteer Gill has shared some tips for long-haul travel following her trip to Vietnam and Cambodia with husband, Alan.
Gill’s tips on travelling with a hearing loss
Shona wrote about her wonderful trekking expedition to Nepal. I have great admiration for her for not being put off by any misgivings about the possible additional challenges she might encounter because of her hearing loss, adding to the physical demands of trekking.
My own recent travels presented no great physical demands, and I was travelling with my hearing husband who was usually around making the communications aspect easy for me.
Here are some tips from my experiences which might assist others thinking about their own travels.
Alan and I are getting close to our 80th birthdays and are finding long-haul travel more tiring. In February, we took a four week trip to Vietnam and Cambodia which involved moving on 11 times. On two of those moves, only a small amount of baggage was allowed because of storage restrictions, so we left the rest in safe keeping at hotels.
Our trip was put together by a travel agent, and we had the luxury of being met by an English-speaking guide at new destinations and being delivered to trains/boats/hotels without having to deal with this ourselves. If this is affordable it is certainly worth paying for. Vietnam and Cambodia are currently cheap destinations, and I guess that the cost of assistance of the same degree in USA, for example, might be prohibitive.
English-speaking guides doesn’t mean that they speak the King’s English and I had to concentrate a lot more than usual. Local guides in Vietnam and Cambodia often dropped the final consonant of words. e.g. “fi” for “five”, “tri” for “tribe”. There were the normal lipreading pitfalls, e.g. when I asked what the small balls in a soup were, I thought the reply was “Beef and sweet”. Like sweet and sour pork, I’m thinking. The “sweet” turned out to be squid! 75 years of lip-reading failed me there!
Some guides were, unsurprisingly, less fluent and therefore slower to put the English words together. That gives a dilemma – do you wait for them to work out what to say, and keep watching ready to lipread, or do you look away at the scenery, etc., and risk missing something interesting that they say.
When we were on group tours, the guides sometimes used a radio microphone system. These were called a Vox. I plugged my Sarabec neck loop jack plug into the headphone/ear-bud socket and usually found this very good – the dialogue being transmitted directly into my CI processor. Guides on coaches using the coach microphone system I found very difficult, if not impossible, to understand – very frustrating sometimes – it’s not often possible to sit somewhere that enables lipreading.
Google Translate, if accessible, works well as long as people are literate – there is a lot of illiteracy in Vietnam and Cambodia. You need access to wi-fi to use this. My husband paid a small amount for a special SIM card so he could always access wi-fi. Wi-fi is essential for using Google Maps too.
It is possible to download some guidebooks – useful for reading up in advance, or in real time if you wish.
For early morning alarms my Shakeawake was indispensable and a back up to Alan’s phone alarm.
It’s usually possible to enlist a willing buddy for occasions when you are on your own. Alan was unwell for part of our trip and I found that people are very willing to assist.
At mealtimes we try to dine on our own if I am very tired. If we must dine with others, the ideal is no more than four total. Sometimes we had no option and tables for eight were a bit of a nightmare, but hearing people were not faring much better.
When travelling by air I always wear my sunflower lanyard. Alan normally passes on any announcements of interest, but I am aware that if there was an incident when we are not together, people will see the lanyard and know that I might have difficulty with communication.
Remembering Lynda Meredith
We would like to pay tribute to the wonderful Lynda Meredith who sadly passed away on 25 June 2024. She was an integral part of the Northern Ireland volunteer team along with her beloved husband, Hadyn, who died just before the pandemic. After Hadyn’s death, Lynda moved from Moira in Northern Ireland to Hertfordshire to be closer to her son, Gareth and they had visited The Grange together before lockdown.
Hadyn had lost much of his sight, as well as his hearing, by this time and Lynda was such a great support to him, although she instinctively knew when to step back.
All of the Northern Ireland volunteers worked incredibly hard to support the application for this award and Lynda and Hadyn were there, sharing their experiences to spread awareness of hearing loss to help, which is what’s happening in the photo with James Kemp. Although James doesn’t really want them to have the microphone for too long!
We had lots of fun and laughs, as well as more poignant moments. Lynda was a very caring and wise person and we won’t forget the kindness she spread to everyone she met.
Lynda and Hadyn had spent some time in the Southern Hemisphere and, because it’s such a lovely poem, I’d like to share this Maori verse and its translation with you. This was part of the celebration of Lynda’s life on Wednesday 17 July.
