Found In Ceylon

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.

Thursday was my first full day of teaching at the school. In two days at the Rohana Special School, I’ve just about learned all there is to know about English education for the deaf in Sri Lanka.

Despite my limited (but not for long!) fluency in Sinhala Sign Language, my inability to read or speak Sinhala, and my inexperience with the teaching profession in general, it’s already been clear that the students aren’t learning English now, and have not been learning English despite sitting through English classes since Grade 3.

If you look at their workbooks, they certainly look proficient in English. They’re writing complex sentences, answering fill-in-the-blank questions, and analyzing long English passages in their textbooks.

But when I reviewed vocabulary lists such as animals (dog, cat, hen, cow, snake, rabbit…) or sports (volleyball, cricket, football, carom, netball…), they had tremendous difficulty spelling out the words. One student tried to spell cricket like this: c-h-l-g-h-e-t.

Students’ levels of English skills varied wildly along the dimensions of reading, spelling, meaning, and usage. There are a few who are quite good at finger-spelling words using the British two-handed alphabet, but cannot decipher the same words when written on a blackboard. Nearly all of them show confusion within the lowercase b/d, t/l/i, e/c, and n/r/h letter groups.

One Grade 9 student insisted that I spelled “GALLE” wrong, and rewrote it as “Galle.” A few others, when fingerspelling the ABCs, could not reach the letter z without my assistance; the same was true for writing it out.

So what’s going on here? Their workbooks reveal an advanced command of English with deftly-composed paragraphs about Sri Lankan life, but classroom instruction shows their English levels to be rudimentary at best.

Sophie, the volunteer from the United Kingdom who worked at Rohana for three months (and went back to university in Scotland just three weeks before I arrived), wrote a wonderfully detailed report on Rohana’s English instruction. She wrote about this very same discrepancy between the workbook contents and the in-class exercises, and explained that the students, through “careful trickery (through looking at what words are in the same in the question as in the text), a skill in being able to copy, and a HUGE amount of guesswork,” are able to reproduce a high level of English use in their workbooks.

And the students have been doing this for years. Grade 11 is devoted mainly to preparing for the Ordinary Level (O/L) examinations, which I think are like a combination of the SATs and high school exit exams, to use American terms. To me, they look like the SAT II English Comprehension exam, covering adverbial clauses of condition, gerunditive terms, and using analytical reasoning to draw inferences from passages.

I remind you that the Grade 11 students at Rohana are still learning the alphabet.

The teachers have been powerless because the English syllabus is decided by the national education department in Colombo. No modifications have been made for instructing English to deaf students or even special-needs students, for that matter. As all teachers in Sri Lanka are government-paid employees, they are bound to the national curriculum; deviation from the norm can result in dismissal (and the salary is good enough to cause a glut of teachers in this country; one nearby school with 50 students has 25 teachers).

The last few days have been somewhat difficult as I try to absorb the magnitude of this problem concerning English education. For years and years, these students have been simply copying English passages from their textbooks into their workbooks. Imagine that…copying and guessing for seven years. Instead of teaching deaf children how to understand even the most basic English, Sri Lanka’s educational bureaucracy has turned them into glorified xerox machines. It makes me want to cry.

And now, what I’ve just said all concerns English. In America, we have enough difficulties teaching deaf students English, and it’s our primary language. In Sri Lanka, it’s a second language (or even a third; they also learn Tamil). What of their Sinhala, math, science, history, agriculture, art, and life skills proficiencies? Has the system also failed deaf students in these aspects? Should the meager resources expended on English education be allocated to other, more useful subjects instead?

Anyone who visits Rohana can see there is dire need for improvement at all levels. The first two changes would be to boost the allocation of money to deaf schools, which currently receive 50 rupees per student per month. That’s $0.50…for Rohana, which has about 100 students, it adds up to $50.00 a month (teacher salaries are paid separately by the government). The second change would be to initiate a nationwide dialogue on deaf education as it stands today and begin collecting change recommendations for educational reform.

Well, all talk for now, but we’ll see. For now, my task is to go back to the basics, build on Sophie’s past successes with the children (alphabet drills and basic vocabulary), and maybe even help them begin constructing basic English sentences.

Despite the sorry state of English education, the children are so, so delightful to be around. I’m already looking forward to Monday…it’s a sheer joy to be around them and to provide them with a radically different teaching approach. I have so much more to say about that…but later!

Did you know that yesterday was the International Day of the Deaf? I think it’s shameful that it’s such a non-holiday in America’s deaf community.

So yesterday, I was introduced to the deaf community living in Sri Lanka’s southern province (although most were from the greater Matara area). I’ve already been to the school a couple times, which have been supremely delightful experiences and will be detailed further in another blog, so yesterday isn’t the first time I’ve met a deaf Sri Lankan.

But for just about every single deaf Sri Lankan I’ve met so far, I am the first white/foreigner Deaf person they’ve ever met. As Nerissa said, I’m Justin Timberlake to them. There’s twenty of them surrounding me at any time, eagerly asking me questions like, am I married? 9/11? Did I go to university? Am I English or American? What’s that on my head? Am I really, truly deaf? Do I hate Pakistan? Do I have a girlfriend back home? What am I doing here? When do I go back? Did Iraq really go to war with Lebanon?

My only concern is that, between the school and yesterday’s IDD event, I’ve talked almost exclusively with men and boys. If conversation length could be measured in dollars, and with the way things have been going, women’d be earning $0.02 to every $1 that men earn. I mean, it’s a cultural thing, that’s for sure, but I don’t want to appear like I’m ignoring all the women here.

Back to IDD. The local deaf association, RSCD (I have the full name somewhere in my photos; will edit this later), put on a three-hour performance at the community center (where all this took place). It involved about ten separate Sri Lankan dances, two magic shows, a couple speeches, two skits, and a candle-lighting ceremony involving local important people like the police chief, the president of the CFD (Central Federation of the Deaf), the principal of Rohana, and a couple others. Of course, it was all interpreted in Sinhala Sign Language, so much of it went over my head.

It was delightful to watch the show, and afterwards, everyone wanted to know my opinion right away. I told them I loved it as I’ve never seen Sri Lankan cultural dance before, and that, considering their resources, they put on a better show with a greater audience turnout than many American deaf state associations could accomplish, and that they should be proud.

But honestly, it was clear that they didn’t need my validation. They already knew they pulled off a great IDD.

I have pictures and so many more words to say, but I have a meeting soon with the principal of the school, Mr. N. Abeygunawardana. I’m on a dial-up connection (230 kbps) but, again, once I move into a guesthouse, I’ll start using one of Matara’s internet cafes which have faster connection speeds (supposedly).

Well, duh. Ayubowan doesn’t just mean good-bye. It also means hello, blessings, and all sorts of nice pleasantries. You say it while bowing a little and putting your hands together as in prayer.

But don’t get the idea that people are ayubowaning each other all throughout Sri Lanka. No one has greeted me in this way in the last five days, nor have I see anyone say this to anyone else. So much for that.

During the chaotic five-hour ride from Colombo to Matara, three words popped up everywhere and eventually turned into a mantra: Lanka Ashok Leyland. It’s on the front and rear of 75% of the buses and about 60% of the trucks here. A quick Google search a few minutes ago reveals that it’s the local car chassis corporation here.

Anyway, so I have been in Sri Lanka for about five days now (although it is a little difficult to keep track of time here, like on any other big trip). I’ve been staying at “Pointe Sud,” Nerissa and David’s home in Kamburugamuwa. It’s a gorgeous Indo-British colonial home perched atop a large hill overlooking the Indian Ocean. While the immediate surroundings are green lawns with coconut trees and banana plants, we are unmistakably in the middle of the tropical jungle. No big animals prowling around, though.

Nerissa, David, and their son, Sammi, are U.K. ex-pats who have been living here in Sri Lanka for about five years. Included among the many community projects they manage is the Rohana Special School, the place where I’ll be volunteering, probably officially starting tomorrow (I have a meeting with the principal today).

Living on an estate with eight house staff serving you three meals, afternoon tea, and lime drinks is not the typical way a volunteer begins his shift in a Third-World country, and I remind myself of that fact every day. Still, the ocean views are unbeatable, the sunsets mind-blowing, and there’s never been so many stars twinkling above the hundred-odd fishing boats whose searchlights mark the night horizon.

When I get more settled in — that means moving out into a guesthouse in Polhena in the next couple days, and starting at Rohana — I’ll definitely be able to blog more. There’s so much to say, really!