Imagine yourself in a country where you don’t speak its language, you don’t understand people, they don’t understand you too, and they don’t even try to understand you. Now, imagine that the same situation happens to you while you are in your country! You don’t understand people’s language, you speak a language that seems strange to them, they don’t understand your language, they do not believe at all that it is a language, they treat you as a person with poor understanding merely because they do not understand the meaning and the value of your language. As a deaf person, I cannot hear, my world is without sounds. People call me and call the people like me as “dumb persons”. When my mum was searching for me for a school, she was asking about the address, people told her “are you asking about dumb people school? It is at the end of the street”. I want all people to know that I have personality and I have voice but I express my voice in a different language, which is sign language. But, as people do not know my language, my world is limited since my childhood. When I joined the university, I was very happy because I thought that I would not be confined within my small community and I would be a part of a greater world. Unfortunately, my expectations went wrong. People in the university felt that I am strange but I excused them because they have never dealt before with person who uses sign language. I decided to focus on my study and I expected that things would be different after my graduations. I was ranked the second among my graduation class, my grade was excellent with honor. I was very excited because I would depend on myself and had a job. However, they told me “we cannot accept you because we do not know how to deal with you … we cannot understand you”.
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This sentence was the same sentence sent to me after applying in any job. No one exerted any effort to understand me, no one tried to understand me, no one tried to know whether I can do the job or not, no one thought for seconds “Is it possible to have a deaf employee?!” Finally, I found a job in a place that believes in diversity, that deals with each person based on his abilities and provides opportunities to each person to enable him to reveal his abilities. I work as a weather announcer for an international channel. I use the sign language to talk about the weather and explain how it will be. The job is very simple. We, the deaf people, need tools that help us deal with people and understand each other, mostly important is to have people who believe that we deserve to be a part of the society, not to be isolated alone throughout our lives. If the society changes its look on people with hearing disabilities, the situation will be better to a great extent because we will not be deprived from many opportunities that we deserve and the language barrier that always stands in the way of achieving our dreams will be broken.
I support Atta Fund because it holds projects to support deaf people and people with hearing impairment and enables them to merge in the society. This is why I share my story to let people know that I broke the barriers and to tell them that they can have confidence in deaf people and give them opportunities without hesitations.
