LDG: Link The Deaf Ghana – Sign Language Video

It was in April that the story started. My colleagues, Daniel and Lansah, invited me for a sign language class held in Tamale. When I arrived at the place with them, I saw parents of our deaf children sitting on benches under a tree. This story started with the warm hearts of the colleagues.

I make a habit of seeing off students at the end of term. On the last day of term, students go home by twos and threes from morning to evening and students who come from far towns hire a bus and leave school in a group. And it was 2 years ago that I was really shocked by the words of students. When I said to some students “You’re happy now to go home!”, they answered “No”. They explained that their family didn’t know sign language and they couldn’t communicate with their family. Imagine that you live in a family without communication and that are isolated in your sweet home. Nevertheless I realized that I was regrettably helpless for this matter because it’s a family business.

When I was talking with Lansah and Daniel about the sign language class for parents, I suggested making a sign language video and distributing it to parents for their self-learning at home, which would help deaf children and parents to communicate each other. And I asked my colleagues if they wanted to work on it. And since they did agree to the idea of the project, I declared that I would be an assistant and all responsibilities for the sign language video belonged to them. I’m a temporally volunteer at school and leave the country when time comes, but the sign language video is supposed to have several volumes to cover necessary vocabularies and expressions for fluent communicate with the deaf. Therefore I thought that they needed to start and carry out the project by themselves and I ought to help them as less as possible, otherwise they wouldn’t acquire sufficient skills and knowledge to complete the project by themselves after I leave Ghana. Yet the story wasn’t that easy.

After we agreed in May, I suggested firstly listing the vocabularies we had taught by then, which were just as many as 20 or 30, and writing them on a piece of paper, but to my great surprise, it took them to list them up for 2 months. In the meanwhile, what I did was to advice what they should do and to threaten them what would happen if they didn’t do it. For this is “their” project and result is theirs; if they complete it by themselves, it’ll be their confidence and experience, but if I lead the project, they’ll NOT be able to make video by themselves and keep being dependent. In Ghana people are in general dependent; they always expect that someone helps them in both funding and doing. That’s why I didn’t help them unless they started. As a result, they did nothing for 2 months and just before the end of the term they started. Anyway I was happy that we could shoot some video clips before students went back home, otherwise we would’ve lost the time of whole vacation.

It was a battle to teach them making video anyway. They didn’t come; they never accepted their mistakes; they couldn’t understand some concepts in computing; they easily forgot and so on. We had quarrels sometimes and they even boycotted the job, yet in October they finally finished editing and made copies of DVD. It was a long way which took them for 6 months, but anyway they made it. And at my last day of sign language class, some parents told me that they started communicating with their children thanks to the sign language DVD. I can’t express my feeling in words when I saw their smile. May deaf children find a paradise at home. And the project continues by the hands of Lansah and Daniel to save all the deaf children living in Ghana at last as they put their wishes in the project name LDG: make a like between all the deaf and all the hearing people living in Ghana.

 

LDG (Link the Deaf Ghana): Sign Language Video: http://youtu.be/QhIUHSIwbgs