Audiologist and philanthropist Dr. Randa Mansour-Shousher volunteers much of her time and resources to helping refugees. Using her hard-earned skills as a doctor and her resources at HearAide, she fits hundreds of children and adults with hearing aids each year.
Hayat spoke with Dr. Mansour-Shousher about her work, inspiration, and more.
What is the most gratifying part of your work with HearAide?
To make an instant difference in someone’s life, who would have never had an opportunity. Especially the refugees: being of Palestinian heritage, my mom was a refugee. She was born outside of Jerusalem, my dad was born right outside of Ramallah. He came to the States and went to college, then went to medical school in France, where I was born. But I saw that the opportunities for them were not what they really wanted, and that was to give back to back home, and live the life that they wanted. And I also wanted…to learn about [my] culture and give back to society. Growing up, that’s what we were taught: to give. So as I got older, I asked myself, what can I give? I didn’t have a lot of money at that point, but you have skills. And I thought, ‘this is a skill that I can give back’.
The refugees in those camps don’t have much, and for whatever reason a lot of them have hearing loss. Whether that’s because of the lack of medical care or genetics or if it’s linked to the war, there’s a lot of hearing loss there. So being able to go back and take mission trips there, and bring a lot of volunteers—many of whom are Americans—they go back with me and we teach them, kind of quietly they just see what’s going on.
We make a big difference just by fitting hearing aides on the children. They’ve never heard sound before, and all of a sudden they can hear. We’re able to see what we call a “new hearing smile”, and to see the mother and fathers cry because [the kids] can hear their voices, and they can have the opportunity to start talking and be able to go to school and get an education and get out of the refugee camps and get a job and get married and start their families, that’s what’s it’s really all about. If I can literally start all that by being able to help them here, that’s all I want.
Thank you for that answer. It’s rare to see someone who is really all about giving, and that’s something I care about a lot too.
Yeah, and you know, I think that’s something we teach our children from the beginning. Even my grandchildren, well our two children—they’re adults now—but from the very beginning they’ve been involved, often locally. Because I don’t want people to look at us and think ‘oh, they’re just raising money to go do it overseas. We do it locally too, and the community supports what we do overseas as well. My kids would come along and help out overseas, and even my grandchildren are now doing it.
Every time we go, they’re going through their clothes, their toys, they’re going to target and getting stickers and coloring books and toothbrushes. And they even want to go—they’re a little young now, my granddaughter’s seven and our grandson is five, and they will be going soon. But they learned in their own ways from the beginning: doing lemonade stands to raise extra money, or giving us stuff to take to the kids there. It’s amazing how it starts so young, it’s in the little things they do.
What is the most difficult part of your job?
Leaving. Because you know how good we have it here, I think part of the worst thing is sustaining what we have, building and sustaining the program. It feels good in the beginning, like ‘look what we did, we serviced 120 children and adults this time’, that’s wonderful…but then we walk away and their hearing aide breaks, or they run out of batteries, and what can we do? So that’s the hard part, and that’s what I’ve been working on: connecting with different programs and grant programs with audiologists in the area. I’m not asking them to volunteer.
It’s one thing for us to go volunteer, but the people in these countries barely make any money as is, they can’t afford to volunteer themselves. So I don’t think it’s fair to say “we’re volunteering, you should volunteer back”. So I’m trying to connect to that network. I take a team, they might be engineers, hospital administrators, I don’t care who you are—you’ll be trained for a job if you join the team. Whether that’s ear molds, helping the doctors hold the children, we find a use for everyone.
And then we have other team members from the countries we visit, audiologists and students so we can teach their students at the same time. So then when we leave, I say, for example: “Dina, I’m gonna hire you, I’m gonna pay you,” so if something goes wrong these people know who to come to, and I’m gonna pay you so if you need supplies, anything, I can give it to you.
What first drew you to audiology? How did that develop into HearAide?
Growing up in a physicians’ household…there’s nothing better than medicine in your parent’s eyes. Everybody has to be a doctor.
Yeah, doctor, engineer, or lawyer.
Yeah exactly, doctor or lawyer, and if you’re really you might get to be an engineer. So I grew up watching my dad dedicate his whole life to us and his patients. And I didn’t want to do that…so I said I was gonna be a teacher. But as I got older, I realized I didn’t want that either, so I started speech pathology as an undergrad. When I was almost done, I started taking audiology. And I always worked at my dad’s office after school and on weekends, and once I took audiology I realized how much more connected to medicine it is than speech pathology—anatomy, dizziness, tinnitus, I liked it more than speech.
What’s next for you?
Ah, ok, well…see, I’m old. I recently sold my practice, and I just want to focus on family, and the refugees. Those are the most important things to me right now.
Learn more about HearAide, and get involved:
[https://www.hearaide.org/]
