Ignorance making life hell for stammerers
Elijah Kimeu from Tala, Machakos County, has been living with stammering since childhood during the interview at Nation Center on August 25, 2022.
At face value, you won’t notice anything strange about Elijah Kimeu (pictured), a 31-year-old man from Tala in Machakos County.
This is until he starts a conversation. That is when you get the full picture of what life is like for this trained journalist who aspires to be a news anchor.
The frequent repetition and prolonging of sounds, words getting stuck in his mouth or not coming out at all, followed by rapid eye blinks or tremors of the lips paint a clear picture of his struggle with stuttering.
Since childhood, Mr Kimeu has been living with this condition that has dealt a blow to his self-confidence. This is to a level that he completely avoids speaking in public. He also hardly maintains eye contact during conversations.
“In primary school, I was made fun of. Whenever I talked or tried to participate in class, my fellow pupils laughed at me. At most times, teachers couldn’t give me time to participate in class,” he explains.
According to Mr Kimeu, giving him a chance to contribute in class often was considered a waste of time.
“This lowered my self-esteem all through my schooling and I was afraid of being active in class,” he recalls.
Being from a humble family, Mr Kimeu’s parents didn’t have the means to seek any kind of intervention for him. All he did was hope that one day the problem would just fade away. Unfortunately, it hasn’t.
This is usually the fate of many living with the condition in the country. They hardly know that though the condition can’t be treated, there are ways of improving their communication skills.
According to experts, stuttering affects more than 70 million people around the world. At some point in life, between five and eight percent of people experience the condition, commonly known as childhood-onset fluency disorder.
“When a child begins developing language, they normally babble. It becomes a problem if it goes on beyond what is considered the appropriate age for this. For instance, if after two years we still hear the babble, then that’s a red flag,” says Sanaipei Sankori, a Nairobi-based speech therapy consultant.
“An individual who stutters exactly knows what he or she would like to say but has trouble producing a normal flow of speech,” she explains.
She says that symptoms of stuttering vary throughout the day. According to scientists, conditions such as stuttering can cause enough stress and social anxiety to impede academic achievement and career success.
For those struggling with the condition, Ms Sankori says, speech therapy is recommended, especially for children.
“Speech therapy normally entails different approaches. For instance, if the stuttering is as a result of elongation of sound, then the child can be helped by reducing the elongation,” explains Ms Sankori, who insists that the earlier a person gets therapy, the better.
“It is easier for children to recover after speech therapy compared to adults because when it comes to the latter, you have to unlearn things that you already are used to,” she says.
Though speech therapy offers tremendous improvement for people living with the condition, its effectiveness depends on consistency.
“It is just like exercising,” says Ms Sankori.
According to the Association of Speech and Language Therapists Kenya (ASLTK), there isn’t any published data on the speech therapists-to-patients ratio, with the majority being based in Nairobi.
“But currently, we are aware of approximately 40 to 45 speech therapists in the country,” says Ms Jinagna Shah, a Nairobi-based speech therapist who is the secretary of ASLTK.
