In Zagreb, capital of Croatia, is the world - renowned policlinic SUVAG, where doctors have been dealing with deaf children and children that have problem with speech for forty years. The program of the cochlear implant rehabilitation of deaf children in Croatia is a world example of success. The key event was a nationwide action "Let them hear". It all started when children of war veterans gave up Christmas gifts in favor of deaf children and their rehabilitation. This led to expansion of the action on a national scale, where everybody took part, from the president and the prime minister to pop stars and ordinary workers. All citizens of Croatia joined in with their effort and donated money through phone calls. Rehabilitation of each child costs $ 30.000 and in this donating action they gathered 2,1 million US dollars, which is enough for rehabilitation of all deaf children in Croatia.

As Professor Mladen Lovrić from policlinic SUVAG said, deafness presents a double problem, problem with hearing and problem of speaking. Research shows that deaf child needs an operation as soon as he reaches two years of age. That enables him normal integration in everyday life.

After the operation rehabilitation is needed and that usually takes two years. It is the hardest at the beginning, because sound is something completely abstract to a deaf child. Rehabilitation starts with vibration table, which vibrates at the sound, so that the child detects sound with his whole body. A person hears with its whole body and this fact is used very well at the rehabilitation. Every sound is connected with a body gesture. For instance children are standing on the chairs with headphones and when the teacher covers her mouth and calls Ivan in the microphone, he jumps from the chair and says "Ivan's here". Children between ten and fifteen are also practicing a theatre performance by the book Little Prince. As their teacher says, rhythm of body language and rhythm of speaking language are identical. Furthermore speaking language follows body language and that is why children are energetically gesticulating words as they are loudly pronouncing words.

In policlinic there is an elementary school, where class runs normally with slight technical adjustments, like headphones and microphones. In this way children are preparing themselves for a regular school and most of them continue successfully in secondary schools and colleges.

Damir lost his hearing when he was fifteen and got his cochlear implant recently at the age of twenty six. Now he can hear, but he graduated at college for engineering completely deaf. Currently he is studying in Trieste, Italy for his PhD. He is doing research on cochlear implant and digital processing of sound and its transfer to the hearing nerve. He said, that he expected to hear normally again after the surgery, but he was disappointed. All he could hear was noise. It took some time for him to notice that noise is changing at certain sounds.

Hearing with a cochlear implant is not like our normal hearing, so patients have to learn from the scratch how words sounds like. Usually takes between one to two years before a patient can hear good enough to understand speech by telephone. The technique of cochlear implant is incredibly successful and it brought a lot of hope to people who suffer from deafness. At this stage it can not help deaf people which have a damaged inner ear. It needs to be said that this technique has been practiced for just a few years and has not use all of its potential yet. Similar concept of artificial stimulation of nerves is explored by science dealing with blindness. Today we can say that when modern science and modern medicine join their effort, the result is almost science fiction.