Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Shanti Sewa Griha



A few days ago, I had the opportunity to visit Shanti Sewa Griha with one of my deaf students. There are two students in the picture, both in Class 5. The student on the right lives at Shanti Sewa Griha. SSG is a residential and rehabilitation center for Nepalis with disabilities. Most of the patients are lepers or have spinal problems. This student is the only deaf person at SSG.

When I first came to Nepal, I met an older German man who had been in the first class of Fulbrighters to the U.S. in the 1960's. He has been working with this student and SSG (a Nepali-German joint venture) for quite some time, though he lives in Germany now. He warned me a number of times that I should be mentally and emotionally prepared before visiting SSG.

And yet I was not disheartened by what I saw. The author Paul Theroux once described a leper colony in Africa as being one of the most cheerful places he'd ever visited. While I wouldn't call SSG cheerful, it's absolutely amazing what's being done there. Their mission is to become entirely self-sufficient. They have several organic gardens which supply the majority of their food. They have crafts shops, a silversmithing shop, and a furniture shop, all with the mission of leading to sustainability. They also pick up paper waste around Kathmandu and convert it into fuel, which is particularly significant considering the amount of litter, the lack of recycling, and the rate of deforestation for firewood throughout Nepal.

Melissa and I at the performance

The Grand Finale




The older students staged a grand finale. It was like something out of a music video, with the sound turned off.

Dance Program





There was a dance program at the Naxal School the last day before the holiday. The program included skits, modern and traditional dances. I remember two of the students using their lunch breaks to rehearse their moves. The program was informal-- no traditional or modern costumes, just school uniforms. One student did a karate demonstration, a few did acrobatics, but most were dances.

Pictures of America



My mother is visiting, and I took her to the school on the last day before the winter holiday. I asked her to bring photos and postcards, which I showed to the students. There were postcards of Indiana, where my mother lives, and which somewhat resemble Iowa, where I'm from, as well as Colorado postcards, where Melissa lives. The Colorado postcards are of the beautiful Maroon Bells Wilderness, and one of the students told me that her home village looks like this wilderness.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Nepal's Deaf Culture

A friend of mine wants to know why deafness is so prevalent in Nepal, and why Kathmandu has become a hot spot for deaf culture. The answer is a combination of many factors. There is a much higher incidence of deafness in Nepal than in the developed world. This is partially due to physical factors, such as poverty, lack of adequate health care, contaminated water, and illnesses such as meningitis, untreated ear infections and rubella.

Less than fifty years ago, deaf Nepalis were incredibly isolated and had no access to sign language or deaf culture. In the 1960's, the Naxal School for the Deaf, Nepal's first deaf school (where I teach), began in Kathmandu. Nepali Sign Language was developed with the help of Peace Corps volunteers from the U.S. Because more isolated villages, both in the mountains and in the Terai, have no resources for deaf children, the children are sent to deaf schools in major cities such as Kathmandu, Pokhara and Gorkha. There are students at the Naxal school from Nepal's isolated far west, the southern Terai, and the mountainous Himalayan region, as well as the Kathmandu Valley and elsewhere.

Deaf culture thrives in deaf schools. This is the case in America as well, where places such as Gallaudet University and deaf boarding schools become incubators for the deaf community. The Naxal School is the same way. It's a boarding school, and students become assimilated into Kathmandu's thriving deaf culture. After finishing school, there is no incentive to return to their villages, where they have few resources. The downside of this is the potential erosion and loss of their traditional culture. For example, a deaf person from a Tamang village may become distant from the Buddhist practices and other traditional rituals of his or her home village.

Because Nepali sign language is a relatively recent development, and factors such as lack of education and poverty limit many older deaf in rural Nepali settings, there is a whole generation of "lost" Nepali deaf. For example, in my first few weeks here, I met a seventy-year old deaf tailor who was learning sign language for the first time. In Tamang villages in the Langtang Himalaya, I met middle-aged and older deaf people who use only a few rudimentary signs to communicate. They will never get married, and they have very few opportunities. And yet in the poorest of these villages, there are many others with disabilities, and even the most able often lack opportunities as well.

The current generation of deaf people have a whole new world of opportunity. Now there are deaf marrying other deaf, which would've been unheard of in the past, because it was believed that a deaf couple would not be able to provide for themselves, and that their karmic misfortunes would be compounded and passed on to their children. There are more than a half dozen locations for the Bakery Cafe, a restaurant chain with deaf waiters and cooks. There is a deaf politician in the Constitution Assembly. Deaf people have become trekking guides and run their own shops. There are regular parades, speeches and even protests on behalf of deaf rights.

Part of what makes Nepal's deaf culture so vibrant is its relative youth. Like deaf culture in America, it is in a constant and dynamic state. There is truly a wonderful opportunity for cross-cultural exchange between deaf in America and Nepal, and I hope that more deaf Americans can find ways to visit Nepal, and vice versa.

Loadshedding

One of the more frustrating things about living in Nepal is "load-shedding," or regularly scheduled blackouts. Nepal receives most of its energy from hydroelectric dams, which run at full power during the summer monsoon and gradually lose steam throughout the dry season. As a result, the load-shedding hours gradually (actually, not so gradually) increase, and just recently, were upped to 63 hours without power a week.

In other words, six days a week, there are ten hours without power, and we have one day where the power is only out three hours. Most nights, the power is out from when it gets dark until nine or so. And the power is usually out in the morning as well, which means it's difficult to schedule a hot shower around our electric water heater.

Nepal is second in the world in hydroelectric potential, after Brazil, despite the fact that the entire country is only the size of Arkansas. And yet mismanagement, a poor power grid, a civil war and corruption have all left the country literally in the dark.

We read and cook by candlelight in the evenings. As an environmentalist, a big part of me likes my low-impact lifestyle. The water heater is on at most a half-hour any given day, as opposed to 24 hours a day for most homes in the U.S. But 63 hours a week is beyond the point of inconvenience. It makes me realize how much our modern world is reliant on electricity. We are approaching the winter solstice, and never has the longest night seemed so long as it does now.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Oralism versus Sign Language

Yesterday, one of the hearing teachers at the Naxal School, after looking at a picture of Melissa, said, "Your wife is very beautiful. She has the skin of a Brahmin. It is because you speak so well that you have married her."

It is interesting that for many hearing people working in deaf education, the ability to speak is still equated with success and intelligence. Less than fifty years ago, deaf students in America, even at deaf schools, were forced to follow the "oral" method of education as opposed to "signed" education. Students weren't allowed to use sign language, and in severe cases, their hands were tied behind their backs.

I went to a "mainstreamed" school, and I learned to speak well after many years of speech therapy, and because I happened to have powerful hearing aids and a little residual hearing. The oral method doesn't work for everyone. A whole generation of deaf was lost in America because of forced oralism. So much time was spent trying to force them to speak that other aspects of their education were neglected.

There are very few students at the Naxal School who use speech. They are eloquent in their sign language, and read and write both English and Nepali. One of the older students believes that people in Kathmandu are quite accepting of the deaf community, and there are several deaf Sherpa guides who lead treks into the Himalaya, using handwritten notes to communicate.

Rav Bir Joshi is the only deaf elected politician in Asia, and he is able to do his job with the help of a translator. Rav Bir Joshi and Ramesh Lal Shrestha, among others, give eloquent speeches in sign language.

Of course there are advantages to being able to speak a language, but the same could be said of indigenous groups learning to speak English. Speech allows for a wider circle of communication, and an opportunity to converse with the world at large. But sign language is just as effective and useful a form of communication as any spoken language; it is just that not as many people speak it.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

The President of NFDH







Ramesh Lal Shrestha is the president of the Nepal Federation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (http://www.nfdh.org.np/). Within NFDH, there are 24 deaf associations throughout Nepal, from the Terai to the Annapurna Himalaya to the Kathmandu Valley.

Ramesh was just elected to a two-year term a few months ago, and he is also president of the Kavre Deaf Association, located on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley in the same area as the Kavre Deaf School. Now he and his lovely wife live in Kathmandu, and work in the hostel and the kitchen of the Naxal Deaf School, making lunches of chappatis and chickpeas, samosas, Newari soup, or momos.

Ramesh is one of busiest men I've met in Nepal, between his work for the school and NFDH. It's no surprise to me that he was elected to be the NFDH president. In addition to many years of being a leader in the deaf community and teaching sign language, he is a gifted speaker with a great sense of humor.

Pokhara Parade


Girls from the Shrijana Deaf School dressed in traditional costume. They will be performing dances for the Asia Regional Deaf meeting.


Parade of Shrijana Deaf students and other Pokhara deaf, with a few 25,000 foot peaks in the background.

The last time I visited Pokhara was seven years ago, in 2001, and every night there was a curfew because of the Maoist insurgency. It was very quiet then, and my strongest memory was being on a boat out on the lake at dusk, the water and the sky silvery, and the Annapurna Himalaya looming above me. I didn't know what to expect on my return, seven years later... how would it have changed? In the last seven years, Kathmandu has become an even bigger city, sprawling to the corners of the valley and choked with the fumes of motorcycles and trucks.

Pokhara didn't look anything like I remembered it. Is my memory really so bad, or was I simply not observant then? Usually something becomes bigger in our imagination, but the lake that I remembered as small and picturesque was actually large and picturesque; there was a new pagoda on the hill above the lake, built by Japanese monks, and I didn't even remember how Pokhara, too, had elements of a sprawling Nepali city beyond the quiet confines of Lakeside.

It is wonderful to have a chance to go deeper into a place, and to meet people not as a tourist but as someone who knows at least some of the language... everyday, I had the chance to practice my beginner Nepali language, which I can speak much better than understand. But then, I often have a difficult time even understanding English with a Nepali accent.

My NSL is much more fluent, and I had the opportunity to meet the members of the Gandaki Association for the Deaf, who were preparing for this week's events: the World Federation for the Deaf was holding its yearly Asia regional meetings here. Hence the parade, which both welcomed the World Federation for the Deaf, and was also an opportunity to increase awareness in the community about deaf issues.

The marchers in the parade included GAD and students from the Srijana School for the Deaf in Pokhara (http://www.deafschool.edu.np/). One of the signs in the march read:

"Deafness is a natural disaster, not a curse."

From my American perspective, it's a strange, even amusing way of looking at deafness. I don't consider deafness to be either a natural disaster or a curse. But in Nepal, it's a common perception that deafness (as well as other disabilities) is a sort of curse bestowed by the wheel of karma. From this perspective, seeing it as a "natural disaster" may be a big step forward in terms of awareness.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Parade for World Disabilities Day Dec. 3



Students from the Naxal Deaf School as well as others in the deaf community marched in a parade for World Disabilities Day. There were also people representing many other disabled communities-- one of the prominent examples is Shiva Santa Griya, a leper colony and home for people with disabilities. (One of my class 5 students lives at Shiva Santa Griya, but he is the only deaf person there.)

We marched from Basantapur Square (near the historic temples of Durbar Square) down Kantipath, one of the busiest streets in Kathmandu, to the Tundikhel Parade Grounds. After the parade, some of the older students met back at the school to play cricket.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Naxal Cricket Players


Two of the top players for the Naxal School's cricket team. Next year, they will be going to New Zealand to play in an international deaf cricket tournament with teams from as far as England, South Africa and India. The tournament happens every four years, and in 2005, the tournament was in Mumbai, India.


Most days, this courtyard by the school is used for soccer, but sometimes it's used for cricket practice. The chairs are the wickets. On certain practice days, they set up actual wickets and a batting net for practice. Then the players have the opportunity to really let lose and launch the ball as far as they can.

Starkey Hearing Aid Project


A student from Naxal's deaf-blind unit is fitted with a hearing aid.


Getting fitted with a hearing aid while another student looks on. At least a few of the students were worried about getting hearing aids, and one girl told me she couldn't sleep the night before. When I came to the school that morning, there was a young girl crying in the hallway, because the new sounds she was hearing were so disorienting. Watching the kids get fitted with hearing aids was a strangely emotional experience. While I don't remember what it was like when I got hearing aids at the age of two, my parents told me that I hated them at first, and that I used to hide them in the sandbox. And yet now, both my hearing aid and cochlear implant have given me opportunities that I wouldn't have otherwise. Some of the kids love their new hearing aids, some don't. By the end of the day, many of the kids have already taken their hearing aids out, preferring to have silence instead.


Audiologists from India, America and Canada came for two days to fit a thousand hearing aids in both students and in others with hearing loss or deafness. I had the chance to see the Kavre students for the first time in a few months, as they took the bus down from Banepa to get fitted with hearing aids. Members of Patan's Rotary Club had been volunteering for months to set up these two days, helping the kids get hearing exams and fittings for hearing aid molds.

The first day of the project took place at Kathmandu's main Rotary building, and I watched as both old and young were fitted with their new hearing aids. More than one dazed older person had to be helped off as they tried to contend with the new sounds they were hearing.