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 Health & Beauty | May 2007 
Welcome to the World of Sound
 Holly Tabor - newsenterpriseonline.com
| | Jeff Smith, owner of Elizabethtown Optical & Hearing Aid Center, laughs with a child after fitting her with a hearing aid during a recent mission trip to Mexico through the Starkey Hearing Foundation. |
Elizabethtown, KY — Jeff Smith makes a living helping people hear.
A hearing instrument specialist and owner of Elizabethtown Optical & Hearing Aid Center, the Vine Grove man sees every day how different life can be for someone who, with a little help from technology, can hear.
Not everyone can afford the cost of better hearing.
That’s why he participates in Hear Now, a program through Starkey Hearing Alliance, that provides hearing aids at low or no cost through his office for people who qualify.
It’s also why, for several years, he has gone on mission trips to various countries — and even to places in the United States — to provide free hearing aids to people who otherwise might not hear at all.
Through the Starkey Hearing Foundation, a charitable arm of the Starkey Hearing Alliance, Smith recently went on back-to-back missions in Mexico where he and a team of about eight others including his fiancée and receptionist, Laura Buchholz, fitted nearly 2,400 people in Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara with free hearing aids.
“Hearing loss just runs rampant in a lot of countries,” he said.
In places like Mexico, Central America, South America and Asia, there is a higher prevalence of untreated ear infections, ruptures and other ear problems among children in particular.
“It’s the rule rather than the exception,” Smith said. “They have very poor ear hygiene.”
Smith had been on several trips before to places such as Nicaragua, Colombia and other cities in Mexico. But the trip to Guadalajara may have been his most rewarding experience yet.
There, among the hundreds of others with hearing impairments, he met 6-year-old Giera, whose hearing was so bad she never had heard her own voice and was unable to attend school.
“This little girl came to our station, she couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak, couldn’t go to school,” Smith said. “We fitted her with our strongest hearing aid. She looked around, and once she realized she could hear her voice, she started making sounds. She just kept making sounds.”
He and Buchholz did more than help her hear. They gave her grandmother, who takes care of her, money for school clothes and supplies, and with the help of the wife of the mayor of Guadalajara, made sure she could be enrolled in school.
“We kind of semi-adopted her,” Smith said.
Smith also bought toys and food and drinks to hand out to people who, in some cases, had traveled hours through deplorable conditions to wait in line hours more to be evaluated by a doctor and then fitted for a hearing aid — if the hearing loss was correctable.
To recognize the efforts of the Starkey Hearing Foundation team, the mayor of Guadalajara and his wife threw dinners in their honor. To thank Smith for his generosity, the mayor presented him with the key to the city, a bottle of vintage red wine from his personal cellar, a ride back to the airport in his personal limousine and a set of gold mayoral cufflinks, which Smith said he’ll wear to the Starkey Hearing Foundation fundraiser gala in June.
It was at last year’s gala where he and the team of other hearing specialists won the trips to Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. That means they placed the highest bids — at $20,000 and $10,000 a person, respectively — to pay for travel expenses, hearing aids and equipment to be given out.
Not a cheap trip to the impoverished areas of another country, but well worth it, Smith said.
“You can’t keep from being changed,” he said. “Every trip you meet somebody or several somebodies that change you. You don’t make money, there you make friends.”
Knowing the difference in the lives of the people they helped was life changing for Buchholz as well.
“(Giera) would have led a totally poverty-stricken life,” Buchholz said. “Your heart just goes out to these people who have no other recourse. These people have no options. Their life is pretty much shot if they can’t hear. I have never felt so good about anything I’ve ever done.”
It’s something they plan to continue even into retirement, Smith said.
“I think it’s a great thing,” he said. “If you like doing what you do, you don’t mind working for free once in a while.”
The couple, along with many others who were on their team, said they’ll be looking to bid on the trip to Guadalajara again at this year’s gala.
“We’re going back, whatever it costs, to Guadalajara,” Smith said. “We’ll bid on it again in June, It’s going to be ours.”
To learn more about the Starkey Hearing Foundation, visit sotheworldmayhear.org.
Holly Tabor can be reached at 769-1200, Ext. 236, or htabor@thenewsenterprise.com. |
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