Have you recently become deaf or hard of hearing? Have you become deaf or hard of hearing as an adult? Then you might want to head to the 20th Anniversary conference of the Association of Late-Deafened Adults. It's called ALDACon and it will be held in Chicago on October 29th to November 2nd.
From the ALDA website:
The mission of the Association of Late-Deafened Adults (ALDA) is to support the empowerment of late-deafened people.
Late-Deafened Adults are people who have lost the ability to understand speech with or without hearing aids after acquiring spoken language.
ALDA is committed to providing a support network and a sense of belonging by sharing our unique experiences, challenges and coping strategies, helping one another find practical solutions and emotional support, and working together with other organizations and service providers for our common good.
I attended the very first ALDA conference in Chicago twenty years ago. It was there that I met Bill Graham, a guy with a great sense of humor and killer writing skills. I also became friends with Mary Clark, who is chairing this year's conference. What I remember most from that very first conference, was the stories that others shared about becoming deaf or hard of hearing. Some of them became deaf quite suddenly and were thrust into learning new ways of communicating and navigating their suddenly-changed world. Others, like me, grew up hard of hearing with no contact with the Deaf Community.
That first conference was an interesting time for me, because I became deaf just four years before attending ALDACon. I could have so used the support at that time, but there was no such organization where I could spill out my feelings about this sudden change in my life. So whenever I meet a deaf or hard of hearing adult today who is struggling with a change in hearing, I tell them about this resourceful organization.
For more information, contact Mary Clark, chairperson at: ldmpoppins (at) aol (dot) com.
