Young people with hearing impairments are unable to continue their studies after graduating from the special school and find a job with difficulty. Most of them return to the native settlements. The head of the Association of Deaf Children of Moldova Veronica Capatici, in a news conference at IPN, said the cases when the young people with hearing deficiencies find employment are rare, and the employers anyway dismiss them ultimately as they cannot get on with them. The state offers these people the possibility of attending a special school and a vocational school. The latter train shoemakers, dressmakers or wood sculptors, but the young people feel discriminated because they want to study professions accessible to everyone.
If they choose to go to a faculty, the young people face the problem of unadjusted lecture rooms. “We managed to enroll a girl with hearing impairments at the Social Assistance Faculty. Even if she had two hearing aids, she was able to study for less than a year because she didn’t enjoy elementary conditions. If the young people ask a teacher to speak louder, they are told that it is their problem that they do not hear and they should not bother their mates,” said Veronica Capatici, adding the situation in inclusive schools is similar. Even if the children are integrated into ordinary schools, not all the institutions have backup teachers, while the institution managers do not know how to work with such children.
According to Veronica Capatici, the solution must come from the state. The Ministry of Education should provide backup teachers who would help the hearing-impaired young people.
“A sign language interpreter must work with five deaf people. In Moldova, there are nine such interpreters for 5,000 deaf people. Thus, it is impossible for these people to be accompanied by a specialist to a trial or to the hospital. The interpreters should go to the faculty together with young people with hearing impairments,” said the head of the Association of Deaf Children of Moldova. She added that deafness is a disability that is not seen, but the young people with hearing impairments suffer as all the others when they are discriminated and are not offered work.
Olga Dasleanu, a young man with hearing impairments who works as a volunteer at the Association of Deaf Children, said that she managed to obtain a job with considerable effort. Most of her friends who are also hearing-impaired had to go abroad as the institutions there offer them work conditions adjusted to their needs. She works as a tailor at a shoe factory in Chisinau, but hopes to become a fashion designer. She helps several other hearing-impaired young people working at the factory to communicate with the employer as she accepted to act as a sign language interpreter free of charge.
