“Press your hands over your ears,” Donna Burney instructs, her eyes gleaming with anticipation.

Jana Chinn, a friend from church, complies.

“Now,” Burney says, placing a small plastic box against Chinn’s forehead, “can you hear me?”

Chinn gives an affirmative nod.

The box, part of what Burney calls a BAHA — a bone-anchored hearing apparatus — has changed Burney’s life dramatically.

Now she wants to use it to demonstrate to the deaf children of Lipetsk, Russia, that there is hope for them as well.

Burney’s profound hearing loss began as a result of ear infections as an infant and grew progressively worse. She’s had eight eardrum reconstructions, but each time, says Burney, her hearing “improved for six or eight months and then was gone again.”

The hearing aids she got at 14 kept her ears moist and warm —creating a breeding ground for bacteria that “never cleared up,” rendering the aids virtually useless.

Burney says she struggled through high school. The hearing world, she adds, doesn’t understand what a social disability deafness can be.

“Kids don’t adapt to you,” she says. “You get set aside – shoved off into a corner. I could read lips well enough to tell that the other kids were talking about me.”

Burney found acceptance, a place to belong, in an older group of friends. She continues to do so today.

Her husband is 20 years older than she. Some of her closest friends at church are in their 50s and 60s, offering a maturity Burney finds comforting.

Burney was an adult and the mother of a son — Mike, now 13 — when Dr. Dennis Pappas of Birmingham drilled a titanium screw into her skull just behind her right ear.

A few months later, in May of 2003 —she got the small device that snaps onto the screw, bypassing her outer and middle ear and literally vibrating sound through her skull. The results were astonishing.

Burney recalls how, that day in the doctor’s office, she could hear someone breathing.

“That was awesome,” she says.

Brought closer by disability

Burney says her son has benefited as much from the implant as she.

“He is freed from the prison of deafness,” she says.

Burney’s deafness, while creating an unusually close bond between her and Mike, also made her dependent on him for certain things.

“When he was born,” she recalls, “he had colic so bad. When he went to sleep I’d lay him on my chest and take short naps. That way, when he began moving, I’d wake up. Otherwise, I’d have to sit and watch his crib to know when he woke.”

By the time Mike could walk, he had learned to let his mother know when the phone rang, when the dryer buzzed, when someone was at the door.

When the cashier at the grocery store totaled her order, Mike would mouth the words to her — or just take the right amount of money out of her hand.

“He was one-on-one with me all the time,” she says, “and so when it was time to go to school, we decided on home schooling.”

Mike’s advanced learning skills and his difficulty in dealing with crowds and noise also figured into the decision, she adds.

“Mike has become socially alive at Friendship (United Methodist Church), where there’s a big youth group,” she says. “But even now, he says he has no desire to go to public schools.”

Taking message to Russia

It was at Cairo United Methodist Church in April of 2003 that Burney says she “learned to rely on God, to give over control.” She’s now at Friendship UMC, still looking to the church as her support system.

When Vladimir Boev, a pastor in Lipetsk, visited Friendship recently, he was astonished to hear Burney’s story and see her demonstrate the BAHA. Boev, says John Beatty, a member of Friendship who will be making his sixth trip to Lipetsk this summer, “has a great heart for deaf people.”

Though Boev himself has normal hearing, he was born to and reared by deaf parents and at one point was institutionalized in the belief that he was of low intelligence. Boev’s aim is eventually to establish a church for the deaf in Lipetsk. He recognized the potential Burney had to be a bridge from the hearing world to the non-hearing.

Lipetsk, says Beatty, is a city of 600,000 people located in a region of the same name with a population of 1.2 million. Located about 250 km southeast of Moscow, Lipetsk was in Soviet times a closed city. This year’s mission trip will be the sixth such trip Beatty has gone on with Global Mission Fellowship, an evangelistic outreach group. Beatty and Burney are part of a team of 19 from Friendship UMC in Athens and Asbury UMC in Madison.

“Global Mission Fellowship plants new churches and grows existing ones,” says Beatty. “Five years ago, there were only two or three protestant churches there. Under our efforts, six new Russian Baptist Union churches have been started. People from all over the U.S. go in teams representing a variety of Protestant churches – the body of Christ working as one without worrying about denomination.

“The average Russian will say he’s Russian Orthodox, but that may mean only that he was christened in the church or that it will officiate at his burial – but in between there may be no attendance. They consider it more of a tradition than a religion.”

The Friendship-Asbury team will conduct vacation Bible school in a full-day program that serves breakfast, lunch and snack. This year a session for deaf children will run concurrently with one for the hearing.

Demonstrating the BAHA

When the doctor who performed Burney’s implant learned of her plans to go to Russia with a message of “hope for healing” for the deaf children of Lipetsk, he donated a BAHA box so that Burney could demonstrate it and — at least for a moment — let those children be a part of the hearing world. In the evenings after VBS, team members visit in the homes of parents. That’s where Burney hopes she can be of use.

“I think she’ll be a strong witness,” says Beatty. “I know she’ll make a great contribution.”

A new person

The Donna Burney of today bears little resemblance to that inward-looking child with no friends. She shows no apparent hearing deficits; her clear speech gives no hint of her non-hearing childhood. Her outgoing personality and positive outlook are undiminished by past hardships, including the fire that broke out in her family cabin last November, destroying the BAHA “box” that she removes while she sleeps. (It has since been replaced.)

With an empathy for children whose hearing loss renders them “cast-asides,” Burney is focused on the goal of sharing her message of hope. The mission team leaves for Lipetsk on June 21 and will return July 2.