At the Kavre School

Here I am giving the first of two speeches in Kavre, though at this point, I hardly know Nepali Sign Language! This is a special program called "Human Rights Through Sign Language," and this afternoon, a deaf motorcycle rally made its way from Kathmandu to the school in Kavre. Deaf people are technically not allowed to have driver's licenses in Nepal, and the rally was designed to raise awareness on the lack of equal rights.


Dancers from the Kavre School wearing traditional costumes.


The students performed traditional Tamang and Sherpa dances for the audience. That's me in the background looking on, along with other guests of honor, including Rav Bir Joshi, member of the Constitution Assembly and the only deaf elected politician in Asia.

Deaf Tamang Brothers

In a traditional Tamang town near the Tibetan border, we met an 80-year old woman with two deaf sons. Her first two children had died. She sat in the yard of her home, where her sister-in-law was sifting corn and another woman took an occasional pinch of snuff and leaned back on her bamboo stool. The mother told us that she was afraid of dying with no one to care for her sons. Her older son was 60, her younger son 45. The older son was working in the fields, while the younger sat by himself under woven baskets in the corner of the yard. He was hidden from sight, and his mother led him by the arm into the courtyard, where he refused to look at us. He wore a tattered red tunic and had a shaggy mop of black hair. He was very shy and seemed depressed. When she let go of his arm, he retreated into the house, his head low, still not looking at us. We were told that he was afraid of new people, and when he returned to the doorway, he sat looking over the courtyard with an expression of abject sadness.



A few minutes later, his older brother returned from the fields, a wide smile on his creased face. He was literally bouncing up and down with excitement, and he pantomimed that he worked in the fields while his younger brother wouldn't work. Like the deaf man above the village, he knew only basic hand signs and gestures. The brothers personalities' couldn't have been more different.



On the hillside before reaching the town, we'd met a deaf man with an empty bamboo basket slung over his shoulders. In his belt he had a khukuri, a traditional Tamang knife, and he carried a long stick of bamboo, which would be stripped into rope for bundling firewood. Later that day, he would hike the steep descent back to the village with a heavy load of wood.

I tried to sign with him, but he only looked at me in confusion. One of our guides knew a few words of “sign,” words that were self-explanatory and used in rural villages all over Nepal. By snapping his thumb and middle finger and pointing his forefinger in the air, he was able to ask the man where he was going and what he was doing. The man gestured up the hill, and made a chopping motion with his palm to indicate that he was gathering firewood.

I signed to him that I was also deaf, and he began to laugh at me. He simply couldn't believe that we had this thing in common. I pointed at the hearing aids in my ears, and he laughed and pointed. I wanted to laugh with him-- we could share this at least, but clearly he was also confused and uncomfortable. What could this white man with a big fancy backpack have in common with him?

He continued up the hill, and we went further down, where a group of young girls was cutting grass for fodder. We asked if they knew the deaf man and what his name was, and they giggled, too. He was called Tuku, and I wondered if he knew his own name.

Gatlang

These villages are due west and northwest of the town of Shyrubesi. Shyrubesi is the starting point for the popular trek into Langtang Valley, which is to the east. While thousands of tourists visit the Langtang Valley every year, few make their way to these traditional towns, though that is slowly beginning to change. While villages such as Gatlang and Thuman are old Tamang towns, their isolation has also led to poverty and few opportunities for the people who live there. In each town I inquired about deaf people, and there were always three or four working in the fields. In one town, I visited a deaf man's sister-in-law. Her husband had died and now the deaf man owned the house.

“Do you want him?” she asked us. “You can take him.” She couldn't understand how anyone could have any interest in the “limpia” who lived with her.

In these towns, deaf people have very few opportunities. I met none whom where married, and their families consider them burdens, though they seemed to put in an equal share of work in the fields. In another home, an old woman and mother of three deaf children showed us her paralyzed legs, which were covered with a skin disease. Clearly everyone has hardships here, though the children run laughing through the streets, chewing on stalks of sweet corn, climbing trees and watching us curiously.

Above the village of Gatlang, men and women in knee-high rubber boots hauled loads of grass fodder, firewood and ferns. The ferns are mixed with manure to make a natural fertilizer. In the terraced fields, dzo, a male cross between yak and cows, pulled plows through deep, muddy furrows, and I watched as the men struggled to keep the furrows straight and the dzos moving in a direct line. Here there were shelters covered with blue plastic tarps, or small stone huts with roofs of bamboo, temporary lodgings for farmers during the growing season, with the remnants of fires with blackened tea kettles resting on them. Dawn was rising over 24,000 foot Langtang Lirung at the head of the valley, and already, many of these farmers had probably been in the fields for several hours. Which of these men were deaf? In the village below me, how many men and women were struggling with illness and disability, like the paralyzed woman who could no longer move from her porch? Because of the smoky fires in each home, cataracts, blindness and respiratory illness are not uncommon.

I sat by a chorten as the sun rose. Chortens are stone structures, often with prayer flags strung from the top, and stones with Buddhist inscriptions line their sides. Our guide told us that communities would come together to build these structures in the belief that they would gain merit for future lifetimes. Sometimes the ashes of a revered lama are stored inside. Most of the chortens are older, though. Nowadays, it's hard for villagers to set aside the time to build them.