Faith Duri
Sunrise Sign Language Academy (SSLA) in partnership with Masvingo City Council will be offering sign language training next week from June 13 to 17 2022 at Civic Center in a bid to assist the visually and speech impaired to communicate better.
In an interview with TellZim news council Gender Focal person Stabile Matava said they have realized a communication gap between their employees and people who they serve.
“We noticed that we have visually and speech impaired patients who come for our services at local clinics, so they are forced to be in a consultation room with their aides of which at times they do not want their aides to know about their health status due to privacy issues. We want to avoid issues of delaying treatment to our patients.
“We have noticed is that we have a lot of vendors nowadays who are visually and speech impaired, so there is communication barrier between them and our municipal police so we have employees who have these disabilities too. Thus we want them to be part of us,” said Matava.
Douglas Mapeta founder and chairperson of SSLA said they will be training through their partnership and national engagement as far as reaching out to people with disabilities.
“Masvingo City Council has shown interest in bridging the communication gap so we will be training their staff and the community at large and those that will be coming to learn.
“We will also engage the church during the night about awareness on disabilities so that the deaf community and other people with disabilities are embraced in different churches and spheres of life.
“We also train communities in different areas, as we are official trainers of the Ministry of Health and Child Care and we are in partnership with Reformed Church University and National Aids Council,” said Mapeta.
SSLA is a fully registered and non profitable organization that specializes in sign language training, translation and interpretation, special needs and disability awareness in Zimbabwe and outside Zimbabwe.
It was propounded in 2012 and fully registered with the Ministry of higher and tertiary education.
A google search about SSLA shows that it came as a result of tragedy as tragedy struck the Mapeta family in July 2012.
Mr Mapeta became aware of a special group of children with ailments of all sorts and noted the communication gap between the deaf children and the medical people (nurses and doctors)
A few months later he enrolled for Sign Language studies in Zimbabwe (2012) and Kenya (2017) and also did special needs education and still pursuing it.
