On Saturday, July 11, a group of Speech-Language Pathology students will host a fundraising walk in honor of National Aphasia Awareness Month (which takes place in June). The 1-mile walk will begin at the Barkley Memorial Center and end at the UNL Dairy Store. Registration will be $5 for UNL students and $10 for the general public. Proceeds will go to support a future volunteer program that will promote participation in the community for people with aphasia.
Aphasia is a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate. It is caused by damage to the brain through illness or injury, most often by stroke. Individuals with aphasia may regain some skills through therapy with a speech-language pathologist.
“Before starting graduate school in speech-language pathology, I didn’t know much about aphasia,” said Taylor Behmer, one of the organizers of the walk. “When I had my first client with aphasia, I realized the effect aphasia has on a human being is much more profound than what my introductory courses had taught me. Aphasia not only makes it hard to speak or recognize spoken and written words, it can also make it hard to use gestures, and many times the person's right side has paresis (i.e., weakness) so for those who are right-handed, drawing and writing becomes difficult too. Furthermore, they haven’t lost any intelligence, so they know what they want to say, they just can’t get the right words out. Because of these difficulties, people with aphasia often end up staying home and out of public places after their stroke. Communicating becomes so difficult, that it’s either not worth the fight or they are embarrassed by the raucous they’ve created just trying to order a burger or pick up a medical prescription.”
The volunteer program the walk benefits will train volunteers to communicate with people with aphasia, enabling those individuals to get back out in the community.
Registration for the walk will begin at 8:15 a.m., and the walk itself will begin at 9:00 a.m. Individuals with questions should contact Taylor Behmer at taylor.behmer@huskers.unl.edu or visit the group’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Aphasia-Awareness-Month-Lincoln-NE/928269200567623?fref=ts).
More details at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Aphasia-Awareness-Month-Lincoln-NE/928269200567623?fref=ts