Leaderboard

I've had a couple of personal experiences that have brought me here. After leaving school I worked as a teller in the local branch of a building society and one of the first customers I served was deaf. They had some issue they needed resolving but the communication barrier meant neither I or anyone else in the branch could help him. He got upset and very very angry. He shouted incomprehensibly in my face and was signing frantically. I actually thought he was going to get violent but things eventually calmed down and he left, his issue still unresolved. Some of the staff were visibly upset by the incident. I was too - but not upset for myself. I was upset for him. I could only imagine the frustration he must have felt and how isolating the world must have been for him. I took it upon myself at the time to learn at least something in BSL, no official courses, just a few things I picked up of the internet. I learned how to fingerspell, some numbers, and and some basic greetings (hello/goodbye/please/thankyou) and practiced them in a mirror for weeks and weeks in the hope that if such an event ever happened again there would be someway I could help, even if I had to spell out every letter of the conversation. A few years later I was doing a carboot sale and I saw the same man approaching my stall. I don't think he recognised me and I continued to chat away to my wife as he browsed the items on my table. When he picked up an item I was so nervous that our interaction would end the same way it had previously. He asked my wife 'How much?' but she did not understand his speech just like I hadn't in our previous encounter. Thankfully I had grasped what he had asked and was able to sign 'hello'. and '15' as I pointed to the item he was holding. (i can't recall what the item was now). He looked somewhat taken aback - he was expecting that. His face lit up. '8?' he signed back. I was picking up on his facial expressions. '12' I signed back. I couldn't believe this. I was now haggling in a language I'd never even used before. '10' he signed back (I think - I wasn't sure on that one) but at this point I was so elated that I'd been able to make that connection with him that he could've taken that item for nothing and I wouldn't have cared. I shook his hand on 10 and then as he handed over the cash and tucked the item under his arm I signed 'B-A-G'. he gave me a thumbs up and I passed him a carrier bag for his purchase. We exchanged a final sign of 'Thank you' followed by goodbye and I never saw him again. Despite having to spend the rest of the day explaining to my wfie how and why I was able to have a conversation in sign language I was so immensely pleased with myself for what I had done. So reason I'm now on here is because with the global pandemic and everyone wearing masks I imagine the world has become far more isolating for the Deaf. It makes me think and feel how I did when that man left my branch all those years ago. If I can do something to help that then I'll try me best to do it becuase when he slammed that door after our first encounter I never thought 'that went badly because he was deaf' I thought 'that went badly because I can't sign'. and I'm going to change that.

I'm learning BSL for myself and to be able to communicate with others in a similar situation. I've grown up deaf - I had 2 grommets operations as a child and was told to start wearing HA until I grew out of my condition (approx 18 months)... Fast forward 12 years and they realised I also had a deteriorating sensorineural condition, so my hearing gets progressively worse. I wear bilateral hearing aids and increasingly rely on lip reading, but it's not always possible, especially with the current mask wearing, and frankly it's exhausting. I'm 'lucky' in that I can talk and communicate well, and I'm intelligent so I've found ways of adapting, meaning I often get told I "'don't seem deaf" (whatever that means!). Although I'm grateful to not be treated as incapable, this attitude makes it so hard for me to actually be myself around people, I always have to work to hear and it can be really difficult when people don't understand that I actually do struggle. So I'm learning BSL in the hope of being able to communicate with more people, to make my own life easier for those days that I don't have the energy to try to hear and lip read, and to make the world that bit more accessible for so many people.

I have three main reasons for why I've decided to learn BSL and why I'm doing it now. Firstly, it's a language I've occasionally thought about trying to learn over the years. I always feel somewhat feeble for only speaking English (as well as tiny smattering of French half remembered from GCSE getting on 30 years ago), and have wanted to learn at least one other language for many years. Secondly, as I mentioned in my introduction post, I volunteer at a foodbank and have done so for nearly 8 years. We've had a few Deaf people come to us for help in that time, and we've really struggled to communicate. At best, that's awkward and embarrassing for the Deaf person, frustrating for us, and disappointing that we can't provide the same level of service to all our clientele. At worst, someone could be seriously ill or die due to an allergy not being properly communicated. So, I figure having someone who can sign, at least at a very basic level, would be a great benefit to the foodbank and any Deaf clients. Thirdly, I think it's an absolute bloody disgrace that throughout the pandemic the British Government has not bothered to provide sign language interpreters for the extremely important briefings that have been given. The Scottish and Welsh Governments manage to have signers, numerous countries around the world have had signers. You get a tornado in East Emptyville in Kentucky or wherever and the chances are the local government there will have an American Sign Language interpreter to hand. And yet the British Government (who've just spent £2.6 million on a new press briefing room at No 10) can't be bothered to allow the tens of thousands of British citizens who have BSL as their first language to properly access the briefings in the way we hearing folks are able to. That has been really, really annoying me for the last year, so to be quite honest, it's what prompted me to finally get round to committing to learning a new language and that language being BSL. It's my form of protest against the government excluding the Deaf community from such critical information. Finally, I also like the idea of being able to provide random assistance to any stranger who might be struggling. Whether it's someone in a shop who can't understand what the shop assistant is saying to them because they're wearing a mask (not a criticism of wearing masks!), or someone dealing with the police who don't realise they can't hear and think they're drugged or being awkward (a well known problem for people with hearing problems). I suppose ultimately it's an acknowledgement of the social model of disability and my attempt at making a very, very small contribution to addressing that. For those unfamiliar with the term, in very basic terms, the social model of disability holds that a person is disabled more by the way the world is structured (everything from the way cities are built to societal attitudes) rather than by any medical conditions or differences they have.