RSF EARTHSPEAK

RSF-Earthspeak is an organization dedicated to helping the families of children born with cleft palate, a potentially crippling disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate through speech. The unique part of this organization, as compared with other, more recognized organizations of this type, is that RSF-Earthspeak integrates speech training into their mission. It is not an organization who waltzes into a country and community, does surgery, and leaves. Rather is works with local professionals to train families to help their child speak intelligibly and communication effectively. Its organization strives to build local experts in speech training to help families train their child to regain normal speech, thereby creating in local independence from outside help. It was developed by Andi Jobe, a speech language pathologist and her late husband Richard Jobe, a plastic surgeon. After years of participating in traditional surgical team missions, Andi saw an inadequacy in the system of coming into a village, doing surgery, and leaving the families to deal with the inevitable aftermath of such intensive surgery. She noted that many families returned year after year with the same complaints, “My child still has no speech.” She developed a novel approach to speech training that met the needs of the family and child. Better yet, this approach has been impressively successful in returning normal speech to a group of children whose outlook on their communication was dim. This organization has effectively met the needs of the individual while changing the system speech training system dominant in the developed world. It is a wonderfully effective means to give each child a voice with which to communicate.