24 year old Mykola and his 19 year old sister Anastasia arrived in Ireland in April and have been living in a Hotel just outside the M50 ever since. When the Russian invasion started in February, their parents made the hard decision to send them away from their hometown Kiev, for their own safety. As their father had to stay to protect Kiev, their mother made the decision to stay and support her husband.
Since arriving in Ireland, although they couldn’t hear or understand anyone around them, they tried to get involved with the local community as much as they could and are currently looking for a job. If it wasn’t already hard enough not speaking the language, you can imagine how much harder it becomes when you can’t hear anything too. Between them, they have been using sign language to communicate instead.
This is how they found Jordi and Olha through a Telegram forum, organised by the Ukrainian Embassy in Ireland, as they had seen our notice offering free hearing advice, and help and support when possible. Both brother and sister have severe hearing loss in both their ears and for the last 3 months, neither of them have been able to use their hearing aids, so they got in touch to ask what we could do to help them.
After the first consultation, we were delighted to help Anastasia with a deep clean of her Siemens hearing aid and a replacement ear mould tube. Mykola on the other hand, needed a full service for his Widex hearing aid, which but luckily our in-house Technician, Tony Burke, was on hand to check and service the hearing aid back to its best possible performance.
Jordi Cornado (Bonavox Hearing Aid Audiologist)
It was all worth it for the smiles on their faces when we fixed and fitted both of their hearing aids, the moment was extremely heart-warming and emotional for all of us involved.
Both siblings are in need of a pair of hearing aids but are currently only wearing one each. Mykola left his other hearing aid back home, as it had stopped working and he didn’t realise it could have been checked here in Ireland by Jordi, with the assistance of his wife Olha. Anastasia on the other hand, never liked wearing two hearing aids, as she found them too large and didn’t like the stigma around how they look. Since then, they have both now realised the importance of her hearing and how life becomes so much easier when wearing two hearing aids.
They cannot find the words to describe how grateful they are with Bonavox. Whilst Jordi and Olha tried their absolute best to improve the quality of the aids, Mykola and Anastasia were aware their hearing aids were quite old but the most important thing is, they can now hear better and be more involved.