RE: The Time is NOW!!!!!

I just got home and found all of your comments. I have a little story to tell about WHY I posted this video *smile* As you either know or don't know, I just gave a speech at the NHS 2008 Conference in Cernobbio (Lake Como) Italy. I have about five different posts to post about this conference because UNBELIEVABLE things happened, I mean out of control amazing things happened.

One of the MOST incredible moments was when I met LeAnn and Janet, who were present at the convention!!!!!!!! Now those are some POWER ladies. Janet and LeAnn found me and told me that they had been to three other NHSs and never once had a parent spoken at the conference...(Thanks to Ferdi, live for you) They said my speech was "inspirational" *smile, smile* and we became instant friends.

NOW, LeAnn invited me to a summit under a tree on some really wet grass. The "summit" was a joint committe, really loose committee of some powerful and committed parent support awareness organizations from Australia, the UK and the good old USofA, me being the Italian Ambassador of Goodwill, lol.

We discussed creating a parent support component to be added to NHS 2010 and began brainstorming. One gentleman threw out a hundred thousand dollars to be used towards planning this event. *gasp* We discussed how all of the lead professionals in the Audiological field including surgeons, scientists, speech therapists, pediatricians were at this Conference, so the TIME IS NOW to take action in creating a proposal for the 2010 Conference. I jumped up and asked Ferdi, the "main international man" to join us and give us his opinion - he gave us some key ideas to try to make it work, told us he would consider it and asked us to have a proposal by September.

Freaking unbelievable. So the summit group starts getting excited because we are certain that now is the right time to begin advocating for better parent support services in conjunction with Newborn Hearing Screening to reduce the number of cases lost in the system. LeAnn jumps up and starts telling me about the video THE TIME IS NOW that she created and we go to the five minute limit internet point where she shows me her video. I say, "Hey, LeAnn, it's on You Tube, can I blog it?" She says, "Of course!" I spent literally five minutes as I was sitting next to Karl White blogging the video that really hit me. I assumed that the Deaf Community wouldn't need captions because the same sentence is said and signed over and over again in DIFFERENT sign languages worldwide. THAT was what was so touching to me as LeAnn explained the video. There we were at an international conference, I found the people for whom I'd written an article, we found ourselves under a tree discussing a "what if" that suddenly is becoming a reality.

There's the incredible story, but the most unbelievable part is that when I saw LeAnn and Janet this morning, LeAnn had received a phone call in Italy saying that "Someone had 'STOLEN' the video from Youtube." lololololol...

Just wait for my next posts about the NHS 2008, I am telling you, never in my life would I ever have expected to have been able to contribute as much as I did, thanks also to Ferdi and of course...my big mouth.
And to think they didn't want me to talk *smile*
PS. I never left Deafread.com, I've just been away from my computer.