Why am I learning BSL?

[Abi D]

I have always worked in customer service based job role and I love communicating with people and helping people as much as I can. I recently started another job around 18 month ago working in a disability assessment center, We deal with people from the community with all different disabilities. If we ever have a client come in who speaks a different language or is deaf we provide them with an interpreter to help them communicate with us, We had a lady come in who was part of the deaf community, she was very distressed as you could tell she wasn't able to communicate with us properly as me or any of my other colleagues didn't have any knowledge of BSL and unfortunately we didn't have a interpreter available. I ended up sitting down with her for around an hour communicating with her with a pen and paper. This has always stuck with me and I just wished I was able to communicate with her using BSL ,since then we have had other clients come in who have been deaf or partly deaf and I have felt the same frustration but hopefully now I have started to learn the basics and I have more Knowledge I can communicate with people from the deaf community confidently. I am also trying to get my colleagues to take the same course so we all have knowledge of using BSL.