For Syrian Children, Hearing Loss Is an Invisible Wound–But One Charity Is Trying to Help

March 21, 2017

(STAT News) – Six-year-old Aya al-Souqi, a Syrian refugee, held the camera phone up to her gaze and listened to hear her mother. “I hear you!” she exclaimed. It was only the second time she’d spoken to her mother in Beeskow, Germany since getting fitted with a hearing aid by a Chicago-based charity to treat an invisible wound of the Syrian war. Aya, timid and diminutive, was a little over a year old in 2012 when a rocket struck her family’s house in the Eastern Ghouta countryside, outside the Syrian capital, Damascus.