Have you ever wondered, what it feels like to lose your vision? And in addition, not to be able to hear, what is going on in your surrounding? Never to hear the voice of your mom? Or your own child?

Nino knows this feeling. It’s not only the darkness. It’s also the sense of lack of balance. Lack of control. It’s as if she was underwater and couldn’t get out above the surface. Deprived of the ability to see, she took her first shaky steps, trying to feel with her hands the world around. Yet it was still impossible without a caregiver. – I realized, how difficult the life of the blind is and how often I add to their misery by not sharing sufficient information with the society – Nino says.

Her blindness was just temporary. It was just an exercise, fully controlled and supervised, during workshops where Nino and other students were learning about the world of the deaf-blind community. It was one of many trainings prepared by HumanDoc Foundation and our partners in Georgia to improve the quality of life of the deaf-blind.

The deaf-blind persons have visual and hearing disabilities at the same time. Their situation is especially difficult, as the limitation of senses cannot be compensated with hearing or vision.

We have to act because currently the topic of deaf-blind community in Georgia is virtually non-existent, and the awareness of the problems is close to zero. Additionally, people even with one ability (e.g. visual or hearing) are afraid of stigmatization. A person ashamed of their health problems often tends to ignore other disabilities which might appear “in order not to cause any more problems to their families”. A lot of visual or hearing impairments could be prevented to some extent if periodic medical tests were more commonly conducted.

In order to change that, we have opened four Support Clubs for the deaf-blind persons in Tbilisi, Batumi, Zugdidi and Telavi. At the same time, together with our local partners, we were the first ones to start in Georgia activities aimed at building support and care system for the deaf-blind community. Our actions are based on over 30 years of experience of our experts from the Polish Support Organization for the Deaf-Blind.

In the Club, we conduct educational workshops for the deaf-blind and their families. We organize informative meetings for the local authorities and non-governmental organizations. Our Clubs are equipped with modern devices, helping the deaf-blind with everyday life, including optical equipment – different kinds of magnifying glasses and eye charts. Additionally, Club in Tbilisi, which should play a role of a diagnostic and rehabilitation center, received a case of corrective lenses, simulators of eye defects, tonometer which measures pressure in eyeball. Thanks to these purchases, it will be possible to conduct some basic tests and to detect ocular defects in our beneficiaries.

Within the scope of HumanDoc’s activities, we run also specialized medical tests for our beneficiaries. For many of them, this is the first opportunity for many years to check their current health condition. Thanks to our project, by the end of 2019 we examined over 100 with both visual and hearing disabilities.

At the same time, we train our local experts, who will be professionally prepared to work with the deaf-blind community.

In 2018, together with Polish and Georgian linguists, we managed to create a Georgian version of Lorma alphabet, the so-called GeoLorm. It’s one of the ways for the deaf-blind persons to communicate. 1 700 people have already watched the training video, which presents the use of GeoLorm.