Getting a head start is a preoccupation for many parents, especially in Asian culture. It is easy for the parents to feel anxious when they learn of their children’s deafness. The anxiety often comes from uncertainty concerning their children’s future. The story of cochlear implant user Kevin Tafianoto, a 24-year-old from Indonesia, shows us that a CI user could blossom like any other person when shown proper care and support.
Implanted and Shy
Born in 1996 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, Kevin was born with profound deafness in both ears. He was implanted on his right ear when he was 14 months old. He attended mainstream schools all along. While he mostly was able to follow the classes thanks to the cochlear implant technology, it was not without a challenge. Juggling between the need to socialize while being different from the other kids during childhood isn’t easy. As adolescents, we wanted to feel accepted yet at the same time, we wanted to be seen in a good light. We would not want to be remembered as the one who keeps asking others to repeat themselves. Therefore, many of us would resort to limiting our social interactions. Hence, we became “shy”. Kevin was in that position.
Getting Out of the Shell of ‘Shyness’
It took some time for him to get out of the shell of ‘shyness’. The quote – “don’t blame yourself for something you could not avoid” – resonated with him and helped him to gradually become comfortable living with a cochlear implant.
His family members had got his back whenever he was down. His friends would try to understand him. He eventually completed his bachelor’s degree in Business Management at Prasetiya Mulya University (Indonesia) in December 2019. The emotional support from his family and friends has helped him stand up to each challenge in the journey.
4 Steps to Navigating Hearing Needs at Workplace
He is now working as the e-commerce manager at a luggage company, a business run by his family. A workplace presents its own set of challenges. The challenges for Kevin have been to ensure effective communication. He has devised four guidelines to help:
1. Recap – He would repeat the instructions he has received to make sure there is nothing wrongly received or missed out, especially if the task at hand is very important or sensitive.
2. Never be afraid to ask questions -As a working professional, he learns to not let his fear of ‘troubling’ others override the imperative of getting work done right. When in doubt, ask.
3. Take control of the situation – His colleagues may sometimes speak to him out of sudden, very quickly while he is not yet ready to focus on listening. When that happens, he will ask the colleague to slow down and ask them to resume the speaking.
4. Tell the speaker to elaborate – Sometimes he may still not get it even after the person has repeated himself/herself a few times. Kevin will have him/her to elaborate instead. That helps him collect cues to comprehend what the person wants to convey.
Kevin’s side hustle: A YouTube Channel
Kevin runs a YouTube channel outside of work. He shares practical tips of living with CI (e.g. making phone calls, attending lectures) and commentaries of latest cochlear implant technologies on the channel. He hopes that the information could be of help to parents and individuals with CI. The videos on the channel have been viewed over 5,000 times since the channel was launched in November 2018.
Strong Support Is Having People Understanding and Accepting You as You Are
Being a CI user makes us an anomaly. People may not have a full understanding or have misunderstandings about our situations. This is why proactive care and support is important, especially when the users are younger. It is also important to have a support system comprising people who already understand us without us explaining ourselves. It is encouraging that we have many CI users, including Kevin and many in the CI Project Facebook group, are running our own initiatives to speak up and support one another.
Here’s a two-minute video featuring Kevin’s life journey, produced by Cochlear Southeast Asia.
Kevin enjoys making videos
Kevin was implanted when he was 14 months old
You could find more cochlear implant user stories here.
CI Project collects cochlear implant user stories. I’d like to invite you to join the private Facebook group. You’ll receive an update of each new story (about once a month) and will get to interact with the characters of each story there. I’m also looking for more cochlear implant user stories. I’d appreciate it if you could nominate a cochlear implant user (including yourself) for me to write a story about!