Bhaktapur School for the Deaf

Students in classes 1-5 line up in front of the school before going home. The Bhaktapur school is the smallest that I've visited, with only 25 students and three teachers (one of the tree teachers is deaf and is secretary of Bhaktapur's Deaf Association). The students have three rooms of a larger school. The NGO that funds the deaf school also funds a nearby school for students with severe mobility disabilities. However, there is no funding for next year for the deaf school, at least not yet, and the school may end up closing down. After finishing Class 5, students continue at the Naxal School for the Deaf in Kathmandu or at a hearing school just up the hill in Bhaktapur, which provides sign translators. Unfortunately, many students end up dropping out of school after just a few years.

Students in Class 2 play Memory with homemade cards.

My mother, after visiting the Bhaktapur school, decided that she wanted to help and bought notebooks, pencils, sketchbooks and crayons for all of the students! The woman on the left is one of the school's three teachers as well as the de facto principal.

Srijana Deaf School in Pokhara

Students at the Srijana Deaf School in Pokhara, after a day of exams.

Srijana students with the Annapurna range behind the school.

A few of the students demonstrate their acrobatic abilities with backflips off the wall of the field next to the school!

Deaf Bargaining

A deaf man in Pokhara bargains for a taxi fare by writing on his hand.

Gorkha Association of the Deaf

Ram Kushal Pant was born deaf, and of the seven children in his family, he is one of four born deaf. His two older deaf siblings never had a chance to get an education and know very little sign language. But Ram went to the Naxal School for the Deaf in Kathmandu, received his SLC (School Leaving Certificate), and became the first, and only, president of the Gorkha Association of the Deaf (GOAD). He's been the president for 14 years, and has been re-elected to his position five times. He and his wife Sanita are the only deaf adults living in Gorkha; most of GOAD's 35 members are scattered in villages around the province. Ram himself was born in a village five hours walk away from Gorkha. Sanita also finished her education at the Naxal School and became a teacher at the Shree Manakamana Deaf School (the Gorkha school), where she teaches Class 0. Now they have their hands full with a beautiful 18-month old daughter, who is hearing.

In the past, deaf people in Nepal rarely got married. They received very little education, had no way to communicate, and a marriage to another deaf person was believed to perpetuate a cycle of "negative" karma. Ram and Sanita are only one of several successful deaf couples I have met. However, all of these couples have hearing children (a CODA, in American deaf parlance, is the Child Of a Deaf Adult). In American Deaf culture, having a deaf child is cause for celebration. I wonder how deaf parents here feel about their children being hearing. It's a paradox for deaf parents; on the one hand, their child has access to opportunities that the deaf often do not have. On the other, a CODA will not carry on deaf culture in the same way a deaf child would, and there may be a rift in communication later in life between deaf parents and hearing children. Many deaf children do not have close ties to their hearing parents, who may never bother to learn sign language or to treat their child's difference as anything but a disability. By this token, having a hearing child may bring up painful memories of a deaf parent's own childhood, and fears that the same thing will happen with their own children.

Both Ram and Sanita told me that they would've been happy regardless of whether their child was born hearing or deaf. They plan to send their child to a hearing school in a few years, and they don't intend to teach her sign language. The little girl is just learning to talk, and she does know a few words of Nepali sign-- ball, milk, and eat, among others. Does she realize yet how her parents are different from her, and how will she feel about it, in a culture that often considers deafness to be a curse?


From left: Ram and his daughter, myself, my mother, and Sanita.

Visiting the School for the Deaf in Gorkha

The hostel for Gorkha's deaf school. Girls live on the top floor, and the boys have the lower floor.


Students at the Gorkha school.


The "classroom" for 1st graders at the Gorkha school. After exams, they moved into their new location by the hostel, where there's enough room for each grade to have a classroom.

A few days ago, I visited the School for the Deaf in Gorkha, which is about a five hour bus ride from Kathmandu. Gorkha is the former capital of the now-exiled Shahs (the royal government). It's a sleepy little town with little to recommend it other than incredible views of the Himalaya from the old royal palace.

About five kilometers from the city center, away from any villages and surrounded by beautiful forests with a lovely view of the valley below, is the Gorkha School for the Deaf. The school began in 1999 with only 4 students, and now, ten years later, there are 66, with classes 3 through 8 crammed in a single large room, and the younger kids studying outside. There's a class zero, for a handful of kids who have just arrived and haven't learned sign language yet. Few of the students ever see their parents, who are too poor to make what might be a journey of many days to the school.

I try to imagine what class zero was like ten years ago, in the middle of the Maoist insurgency, with just four students in the entire school. Though Gorkha, being a symbol of the Shahs, was often a target of the Maoists, the school was never affected. It seems like a little island, with its hostel, dining room and school all in this small clearing in the forest.

Things have changed tremendously, and are about to change more. With help from Hong Kong, a new building has been built, and students will move into the classrooms after they finish their exams. As I write this, they have probably already started in their new building.

The students who began ten years ago are now in class 8. Next year will be the first year that the school has taught a class 9.

Another Fulbright Perspective

I've mentioned before that I'd like to encourage other deaf/hoh people to apply for Fulbrights. I've been told by the Fulbright Commission that they are actively encouraging Americans with disabilities to apply. Last summer, before starting my project, I met Molly Lubin, a deaf/hoh Fulbrighter who had just finished her project in India. She has graciously allowed me to post a brief on her project. Molly focused on a more auditory rehabilitation-based approach, while I have focused more on sign language and deaf culture. I think both approaches have much to offer.

"During a nine-month Fulbright Scholarship in India, I set out to explore the ways in which Indian society was addressing the needs of hearing impaired children. This included research into available auditory therapy, hearing technologies, and parental counseling. I focused mostly on the parents of these young children, since it is they who invest the most money, time, and energy into dealing with the hearing impairment. I based myself in New Delhi but also spent a month each in Mumbai and in Kalimpong, West Bengal, where I interviewed parents and also gained a broader sense of the country.

I spent extensive time at private auditory clinics for the hearing impaired, at the state-run auditory training institute and clinic for the deaf, and at an NGO for hearing-impaired children. My research showed that parents of all socio-economic groups experience difficulty as they attempt to help their child, but that this was especially true, not surprisingly, for low-income parents. For this group, the problem begins with obtaining a diagnosis of hearing loss, as physicians in the overcrowded and under-funded government hospitals often tell parents that a deaf child is merely slow, or is experiencing a mild ear infection that will go away. Because the parents are relieved to hear that the problem is only temporary, they rarely press for more testing. As a result, children are often of school-age by the time they are diagnosed. At this point, parents and doctors have already squandered crucial years of the child’s language development.

Once the reality of hearing loss sets in, parents must begin the struggle to obtain viable hearing aids and auditory therapy. Many parents in Delhi, especially those who are illiterate or speak neither Hindi nor English, never learn of the existence of the state-funded National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped, which can provide both aids and sessions with an audiologist, free of cost. Often, however, even this is not enough. Through a volunteer association of American women that supported a charitable school in a slum area, I learned of a 12-year old boy who seemed to have profound hearing loss, at the school of three-to-five year olds. His father had died years ago and his mother was a rag-picker. His hearing loss had never been medically confirmed and his mother had not known how or where to seek professional help. Along with other volunteers, I took this boy to the National Institute where, after days of waiting, he was examined and fitted with hearing aids.
Unfortunately, utilizing the free services at this Institute will not solve a low-income family’s problems. The hearing aids that he received were of low quality and hardly functional; the free auditory therapy lasted for an insufficient period of time. The son of the rag-picker received therapy only for a month. This was hardly enough to make amends for a lifetime of no hearing. Gaining little benefit from his hearing aids, he now no longer wears them.

One NGO in Delhi called Suniye (Hindi for “Hear!”) provides additional language and listening training to hearing impaired children, the majority of whom come from indigent families. I observed all of the 30 children who were enrolled in Suniye at the time. Out of 14 sets of parents whom I interviewed in depth, ten reported a monthly income of less than USD $130. The children of these ten sets of parents had all received their hearing aids from the National Institute. Despite their good fortune in obtaining additional services at Suniye, these children could barely speak and relied solely on lip reading, as they wore hearing aids so limited in function.

I organized a conference in Delhi for parents of hearing-impaired children and for professionals in this and related fields. Over 50 people attended the conference, many of them parents from disadvantaged backgrounds. The primary purpose of the conference was to bring together parents and professionals, and to let them discuss common issues, questions, concerns, and areas of miscommunication. Several parents delivered talks on difficulties that they had had in obtaining correct diagnoses, learning to accept their children’s hearing impairment with little or no emotional support available, and gaining school admission for their child. Group discussions at the conference focused on ways of increasing parent’s knowledge of services available to their child, ways of raising awareness of hearing impairment among primary care physicians, government, and society at large, and ways for working to lower the cost of hearing technologies.

In addition to giving a presentation at this conference, I delivered various talks on my research findings throughout the course of my time in India. I spoke to a group of western anthropologists at the International Trust for Traditional Medicine in Kalimpong, to 150 Pakistani college students at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, to a group of Indian scholars at a Delhi-based research institute, the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, and to students undertaking a training program in audiology at the National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped. Raising awareness consists of helping society to understand the needs and capacities of hearing impaired people, and helping the hearing impaired find paths to successful lives and thus become advocates for other hearing impaired individuals."