Promote D/deaf people as unique
Promote deaf people as unique in having both perspectives of disability and linguistic minority and that sign language and deaf culture strengthens multilingualism and are means of promoting, protecting and preserving the diversity of languages and cultures globally.
Every D/deaf people and children have the dream to do something, to achieve their goals, to work as equal in the workforces and to continue their life as equal in the community. Over many years, many Deaf people and children struggle to get involved with sports, camps, going to the movie theatre with their families or friends BUT WHAT STOPPING them! It is the barrier that there were no accessible such as captioning in all movies and in the theatres, interpreters, to have an interpreter or a couple of interpreters available in the performance theatres. Many D/deaf people struggle to find a job in the workplace but the manager declined to employed any Deaf person or refused to pay for the cost of interpreter anytime during the business hours and many other issues surrounding the workplace such as staff do not know about our Deaf language and our needs. The worst one was Health and Safety Regulation law such in the forestry, dockyard/shipping ports, buildings, tradesmen such as an electrician in a dangerous area or join the navy etc.
However D/deaf people are not the only one group, and there are many other people with disabilities who have excellent skills or higher qualification degrees out there. These people do not have any jobs too.
Recently a small group of Deaf people starting to realise the word ‘disability’ after learning from one Deaf lady through EGL (Enalbing Good LIves). I have known this word ‘disability’ since I studied linguistics and anthropology many years ago. It gave me a creep….. Here is a quote from Disability Wikipedia.
A disability is an impairment that may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or some combination of these. It substantially affects a person’s life activities and may be present from birth or occur during a person’s lifetime.[1]
Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations. Disability is thus not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.
— World Health Organization, Disabilities[2]
I will resume to this blog on the new post later on……
