Found In Ceylon

Consciousness-Raising

Last Friday morning, Amila and I rode onto the school campus in a green three-wheeler and were met by boys who looked distraught. It was a poya day; this meant no classes and a three-day weekend. Nothing for overactive boys to be upset about, right?

“Bald-Head is leaving! He’s leaving us!” they cried.

Rohana Special School employs three male matrons (or four; I’m never sure) to watch the boys who sleep in the dormitory. All are hearing, and none of them are remotely fluent in Sinhala Sign Language. Daily, their job shifts begin at 1:30 PM and conclude at 7:30 AM the next morning when the students assemble in front of the Buddha shrine for morning prayers.

Imagine being hours away from your home village, in the care of people who did not understand your language, and have not bothered to learn even after years of continued employment.

We–that is, all the people who have an interest in seeing Rohana become the best school in the country–wanted to see the male matrons go. All of them. So, after some behind-the-scenes work, one of them was finally on his way out the door.

Except that, on this Friday morning, it seemed as if we had gotten rid of the wrong one. The boys apparently didn’t despise Bald-Head (his sign name refers to his bald spot) .

“He helped me when I was sick,” Gayan said.

Priyathkara added, “He’s nice to me. The other two are so mean, they yell at us.”

What the boys were telling us now were contrary to what we had heard from all the past volunteers about this same person.

One day, Sophie asked Bald-Head what he would do if the boys’ dormitory suddenly burst into flames.

“I don’t care,” he replied.

Peter, another volunteer, worked at Rohana for one year and quickly became fluent in Sinhala Sign Language, while watching Bald-Head fail to even learn how to say “good morning.” He expressed to David that he wanted to strangle him daily.

Could this really be the same person that the boys so desperately wanted to keep around?

After a few hours, it became clear that Bald-Head, who was walking around the second floor red-eyed from tears, had voluntarily resigned. There was really nothing we could do. I felt terrible for the boys. So what if he couldn’t sign “how are you?” as long as he could help the boys and, as Gayan said, take care of them when they were sick?

A game of football proved to be a good distraction, and at the end of the day Amila and I headed back home. What followed was a long, long discussion between Amila, David, and myself on the importance of sign language as the primary language used at Rohana.

Amila and even I, in some small part, were leaning towards the “better of two evils” position — that it was probably better to just keep Bald-Head because, at the very least, he helped.

So we, as two deaf people, found ourselves in the remarkable position of being lectured by a hearing Englishman that the right to communication is, and should always be, unconditional at the school. Especially when considering the matrons, who act as the deaf children’s primary guardians.

Pretty quickly, I silently admonished myself for willing to settle for less. I grew up in a deaf institute–and while it was not a signing environment, I couldn’t imagine the torment I’d have to endure if my houseparents couldn’t understand anything I was saying.

Side note: I will admit that the boys are now left with the two worser matrons; it would have been infinitely better if Bald-Head could have stayed on until after the other two were dismissed, but sometimes you just have to take your chances as they come.

It took about fifteen more minutes before I was finally able to convince Amila, using my not-quite-fluent-yet-but-getting-there Sinhala Sign Language skills, that it was frankly ridiculous that Bald-Head didn’t know sign language. He had worked there for four years. Would a teacher for the blind be qualified if she didn’t know Braille? Could a teacher teach English if she didn’t know the ABC’s? The same rule applied here. If you don’t learn sign at a deaf school, you deserve to be fired.

David said it best: “People who do not learn sign language make deaf people disabled.”

I walked away from the intense discussion feeling a little dazed. On one hand, I had just attended a consciousness-raising session; Deaf power was surging through me.

On the other hand, I realized with sadness how I had taken communication access for granted in America. Sure, we have problems–audism/oppression at deaf universities, educating the ignorant about the ADA–but when all’s said and done, we have it pretty damned good back there.

Here we were, David and I, trying to convince a Deaf sri Lankan that matrons at deaf schools should be able to sign, and it took us thirty minutes.

In a country whose sign language vocabulary classifies people as either “deaf” or “people,” as if to imply that deaf people are not actually people, the widespread realization that communication access is a human right, not a privilege, is still far off.

A few minutes later, Amila repeated back to me what he understood from the discussion.

“Of course they should be able to sign.”

Mission accomplished.

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