We (speech students lah) were sitting in the grad room when a professor came by and asked us if we wanted to some speech-language materials...offices at some place were begin cleared out following a move, and there were two large boxes that were going to be thrown into the dumpster, but she wanted to know if we students wanted anything (waste not, want not!). So being poor graduate students who will accept charity without blinking, we went down, got the boxes. We had hit the mother of all graduate student FOC (free of charge) items. There in those two boxes were hundreds of dollars worth of AAC equipment and standarized test materials (the originals, mind you!). Granted, some of the test materials were older editions, but some were the most recent. The AAC devices! I was pretty offended that someone would toss them out, perfectly wonderful AAC devices when there are thousands of people who could benefit from them. Big Mack, CheapTalk, small and large switch, Optimist with a box full of software (high tech!!! this costs at least two thousand bucks), cables, a mount. There was also a portable pure tone audiometer and all-wonderful, all-purpose-when-all-ideas-run-out artic cards. The sad part was all of the equipment were in good working order...and all I could think of was how expensive these things are and how many people don't have the money to get them even if they need them to be able to talk at all. And in Malaysia, were you don't even have access to them! If not for that professor (bless her heart, as my AAC prof would say), they would be in the dumpster right now.