Nicholas Barnard RHB101: Deaf Awareness Activity 11/26/02
I eavesdrop on the deaf community. I've spent several thousand hours listening and processing telephone calls from deaf customers to the hearing world. I had come to believe after relaying deaf people's calls to mom, pizza orders, phone sex, emergency calls, calls about funerals, heart wrenching calls to the veterinarian, that I had gotten a pretty good feel for deaf people. They're pretty much like the hearing world. Some of them can't type, some of them can't manage money, a few are drunks (and use the telephone drunk, just like anyone hearing) some are very rude, and some are extremely nice.
This was the knowledge that I went with when I went to the deaf kids thanksgiving dinner. I was a little bit late at first, and I hadn't signed for a while, so I was madly running through a bunch of different signs in my head as I drove. When I first burst in the door, I was relieved to see a bunch of people signing; it looked like I expected it to, and was a bit noisier than I expected it to be.
The first person that greeted me dumbfounded me. This wasn't because of any new unknown signs that she used, she was just asking my name, and saying nice to meet me. What was frustrating to me was that she was signing with a camera in her hand. When I signed, or signed with someone else, I was always used to preparing, putting everything in my hands down, clearing my throat, and then signing. I had always assumed deaf people used sign a lot just while doing other things, just like hearing people talked while doing everything, I just had never really seen it. It caught me off guard when the woman who greeted me was signing with a camera in her hand, her signs with her free hand were well made, but visually I was frustrated. It took me a few times of her repeating to understand what she was signing.
Also I was a bit rattled by the burden of understanding. I was used to at relay, just putting it out there, a majority of the time, I had very limited burden of facilitating understanding at relay, I was responsible for providing minimal interpretation at work for what the deaf person typed, but not for what the hearing person said, I just typed it down and let my hearing and voice customers work it out between themselves.
This is not to say that I was unused to being responsible for facilitating communication, when I talked with speech impaired people, I always make a point of giving them my full attention, and being incredibly patient, and repeating back to them what I thought they had said if I was unsure, this is of course very slow, but I felt it was worth it.
This situation was different, I found myself waist deep into the deaf world with only two balloons to keep me afloat. I was unaccustomed to having to work my rear off so the people around me could understand just what my basic thoughts were. When I have encountered people lacking an average human's set of senses and communication abilities previously it was always in the “normal” world, where it always ended up that the other person had the responsibility of making sure I could understand them, I just had to pay lots of attention and work with them till I understood them. I found myself on the other end of this coin, I was the one lacking in knowledge of sign, the responsibility for making sure that we were communicating fell to me, not to the other person.
I felt that my short day at the deaf kids dinner was very valuable, because while I only picked up a few signs, I did pick up the understanding and realization that when I enter the deaf world I am fully responsible for making sure I can understand the other person, and it is inconsiderate and hearing-centric of me to demand that those around me make major adjustments so that I can understand them, I'm the one that needs to do most of the adjustments, with a little help from those around me. Ergo, I've proved what the Beatles have always known, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”