Signs of hope

KARACHI: There was no sound but the message was conveyed, brilliantly, exuberantly and vividly, to an audience that responded to the nursery rhyme performance by kindergarten children with silent but heartfelt applause.

Raising their hands in the air and twisting their wrists a couple of times, the audience conveyed their approval to the hearing impaired children who used gestures to relate stories, poems and songs.

If anyone felt disabled at the programme organised by the Family Educational Services Foundation (FESF) on Saturday, it was the person who did not know sign language.

The event marked the annual accomplishments of the FESF’s Deaf Reach Pakistan programme.

The function, held at Avari Hotel, included a cultural dance by girls in class VII and a play on the theme of unity and understanding by students from classes II, VII and VIII.

According to the chairman of the FESF, Richard Geary, who has been working for disabled people in Pakistan for the past 20 years, there are about nine million hearing impaired people in the country.

“These people are not disabled, they are just separated from us by a language barrier,” he said.

Highlighting the shortage of educational facilities for the hearing impaired in Pakistan, he said that schools for these children are only in a few of the country’s bigger cities, while most of the population in the rural areas has no recourse. “We are catering to only 5,000 of them [hearing impaired people] while the rest of them are still in need,” he said.

Tabassum, whose son studies in the FESF school, sees the organisation’s schools as a blessing for deaf children who she feels would have had no future simply because their disability is ignored by educational facilities.

“My son is good at learning things and he can do everything, he just needs to be taught in a certain way,” she said.

She narrated her child’s “most exciting adventure” in which he went on a field trip to the HMAS Toowoomba ship of the Australian Navy at Karachi port. The students got to meet people and sailors and a chance to learn about marine life. “He happily told me in his sign language about the friendly sailors [who were] dressed as pirates, the games that they played and the yummy ice-cream that they had,” she related with a smile while her son,  Ali, moved his hand to his chest two, three times to show that he had had a lot fun.

With 119 young students studying at different levels till class VIII in the Karachi campus, FESF now aims to add higher secondary classes to the school, said Aaron Geary, the Regional Project Manager talking to The Express Tribune. “We have been adding one class a year and this year we are planning to start class IX as well, but this is a difficult task as we will have to go through the SSC Board,” he added.

Children receive educational and vocational training at the Deaf Reach School, where they also get a chance to learn more languages. “We are teaching them Urdu, English, the Pakistani sign language as well as the American Sign Language,” remarked Richard.

However, there is no common sign language for hearing-impaired people across Pakistan and the signs differ from one region to another, he explained. The FESF future plans include making a uniform sign language for Pakistan.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 6^th, 2010.