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2024 year: 926 146 ₴
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Maria wants to hear





COLLECTED 508 500 UAH. Hospitalization in January 2018. The operation was performed.

Ufond readers and partners raised UAH 64,433. The benefactors of the Children’s Fund of Nikopol raised UAH
444,067 . Three-year-old Maria Borisenko needs a cochlear implant to hear.



The girl is three years old. She has fourth-degree sensorineural hearing loss. This means that the girl hears almost nothing, even with hearing aids. This means that she will not learn to speak unless special devices are implanted in her head before the age of five, an invention that turned deafness into a curable disease and made deafness due to deafness impossible. With her deafness, three years is the extreme age when a child can still be taught to speak, giving him back the ability to hear. It is believed that by the age of five, the human brain usually loses this ability if the child has not been able to talk before. Doctors claim that Maria still has very little time.

In the evening, when it’s time to go to bed, Maria takes off not only her clothes, like all other children, but also a hearing aid attached to her ear. And plunges into unimaginable silence. Before falling asleep, the girl talks to herself for a long time, because she loves and really wants to talk. Only she speaks not with words, like all other children, but with babble. In her babbling you can make out the intonation: here she is asking for something, here she is bragging, here she is upset, here she is angry and swearing. Hearing aids, terribly distorting the sound, from all the human speech around reliably convey to the girl only the intonation. Therefore, she learned to speak with intonations, but not with words.
From the words Maria knows only "mom", "aw-aw" and "am-am". In her endless classes with a deaf and dumb speech therapist, Maria can hardly learn letters because her hearing aid does not make a clear sound. She learns to read and write, memorizing the whole word. She is already unmistakably putting a card with the word "mother" next to the picture depicting her mother, and she is unmistakably placing a card with the word "cow" next to the picture depicting a cow. She also learns to pronounce words entirely, relying on the intonation pattern, rather than on the sounds of which the word is composed. It is a great job to teach the deaf to speak: the deaf repeats the intonation, and the doctor painstakingly places the child’s lips and tongue on the curves of the intonation. Don’t you understand?

For Maria, this means that she can end up in a boarding school for the deaf and dumb a hundred kilometers from home if she does not have a cochlear implant. And if you do a cochlear implant, she will go to a regular school.

She loves to study. Judging by the way she lays out the training pictures and looks at the pictures in the book, she is well acquainted with the hare, the cat, the dog, the cow and the goat. And she knows that a hare eats a carrot, a cat eats fish, a cow and a goat eats hay, and a dog eats bones. And Maria even tries to imitate the voices of these animals. To imitate barking, it is enough to hear the intonation of barking. It is not enough to distinguish intonation to learn human speech.

Maria’s mother, Ekaterina, says that most likely the deafness came from some antibiotics that were given to the girl in the maternity hospital.

- Masha was born on the 28th week. Weighed 970 grams. She couldn’t breathe on her own. After a long stay in hospitals, we underwent rehabilitation courses in neurology. My daughter could not get to her feet for a long time. But thanks to rehabilitation and home massage at the age of 1.9 she took her first steps. Now he walks almost on his own, - recalls Catherine. - During treatment in intensive care, the child was given strong antibiotics. They gave a complication to the ears. Now the daughter does not hear anything at all. Masha put on hearing aids, but they do not help with this diagnosis. All you need is cochlear implantation.
While my mother is talking, we are trying to communicate with Maria in the meantime. Somehow I understand from Machine’s vague babble that among all the various fruits that I list and show in the book, she chose a banana and an apple. Somehow I understand that she chose red from apples, not green. Anyway, when I show Maria a banana and an apple, the intonation of the girl’s chatter becomes somewhat understandable. Or maybe more than all the different fruits, Maria likes to play a game that she seems to say, and I seem to understand her.

"My dear, my dear," says Maria.

- Of course, I understand everything, - says Mama’s mother. "Of course I understand."

And in the eyes of the girl there is a genuine delight that she talked to us so well, and we understood her so well.

Ekaterina says that the girl is always playing this game, all the time sculpting something in different ways, and when one of the adults feeds her, dresses, shoes, walks, she is very happy that you can play as if she wanted eat, dress, put on shoes or walk.

- Only before going to bed, - says Mashina’s mother, - when we take off the hearing aid at night, she lies still for a long time, not falling asleep, and babbles completely silently. I can’t look at it.

Maria can’t tell the difference between silence and sound. It’s hard for anyone to hear how it is. If you do a cochlear implant, Masha will be the one who hears. If you do not, in order to distinguish silence from the sound of the larynx, the girl will take years of work, and maybe a lifetime…

Author Roman Betsenko
Photo from personal archive of the family

Professor, MD Mehmet Ziya Ozier, Asibadem Clinic (Turkey): “We have successful experience in cochlear implantation in young patients, including those with multiple multiple malformations. For this purpose we involve different specialists of our center that allows to consider all without an exception of a health problem. First we examine, finally we are convinced of the need for surgery, and then we implant a cochlear in the girl. We are sure that Maria will start hearing and then speak. "

The Turkish clinic Asibadem issued an invoice for $ 18,000. This is UAH 508,500. Maria’s mother does not have such money.

Dear friends! If you decide to save Maria Borisenko, do not be confused by the price of salvation. Any of your donations will be gratefully accepted. You can send a donation by bank transfer to the Fund. All the necessary details are in the fund. You can also use our electronic payment system by making a donation with a credit card or electronic cash, including from abroad.

Responded (took details): 105 people Helped
: 105 people
Collected: UAH 508,500 January 17 , 2018 Maria Borisenko successfully completed cochlear implantation at Asibadem Bodrum Clinic (Turkey).


A cochlear implant was implanted in the girl’s right ear, a device that receives and recognizes electromagnetic signals from a speech processor attached to the outside. The operation was successful. All sensors gave positive "feedback". The implant will be connected soon. Specialists use all the possibilities of the implant, but so that Maria’s body gradually gets used to the new sound sensations. Now Maria will do a lot and learn to hear, speak, develop and communicate.