Moving beyond words and signs
At age 19, I worked as a shoeshine boy on Delhi streets to write about their hardships. My impersonation stories won me a national award by the time I was 22.
LEARNINGS FROM
THE DEAF
A deaf person of 16 will not have significantly different reactions or knowledge than a deaf person of 40. A deaf individual represents a tragic stasis, the result of communication starvation.
When an abused child is deaf, she already has an existing inability to express a personal point of view. Abuse adds to her helplessness.
Within the family, the child may sense parental and sibling bonds, but has difficulty in distinguishing between relatives and non-family outsiders, seeing them more as “frequent visitors” or “infrequent visitors”.
A spreadsheet formula for identifying networked individuals for peer education in African communities.
Magnet Theatre uses half-told stories and dialogue with the audience to deepen the understanding of HIV risk, and improve the quality of community’s questions.
In 1998, my wife and I were awarded Macarthur Population Program Fellowship grants to study the vulnerability of deaf Indian youth to abuse and HIV, and develop a reproductive health curriculum for them. I faced several challenges — Indian deaf had no sign language; then, given India’s multiplicity of local languages, there was not even a uniform spoken language that they could lip-read.
Abandoning traditional methods, I developed a comprehensive reproductive health curriculum for Indian deaf youth that utilized mime, role play and acting to explore and understand sometimes complex biological concepts such as menstruation and pregnancy.
The formative assessment we conducted revealed that the deaf could comprehend only whatever was tangible and apprehended through sight, smell or touch. Thus, conceptual frameworks such as kinship, blood relationships, risk, human rights, moral values, and privacy needed to be made sensory in order to be understood. For instance, with aural input, the deaf had no concept of blood relationships, and divided the world into immediate family (living under the same roof), followed by frequent visitors and infrequent visitors. Sexual abuse was most common from frequent visitors, which included cousins, uncles, and drivers.
The final curriculum, now in use in several parts of Africa and India, includes sessions such as The Menstruation Game, and The Immune Game, where the participants role play different body organs to understand menstruation and the body’s response to HIV infection.
MICKEY is a Minimally Invasive Curriculum for HIV driven by self-learning through translation.
My first fiction novel, The Book of Answers, is currently in submissions with publishers in the US and UK.
