ATTITUDE DEAF AND HEARING IMPAIRED:
Hello I welcome you once again to our discussion on Indigenous Hands the
Indigenous Voices um It is so strange and unusual what is
going on around the whole world this time,
our heart goes out to families communities
and nations that are hard hit by the corona virus pandemic, we say
take heart if your family is hard hit if your community is hard hit.
As you can see it has also brought us to an unusual setting
that we are having this recording today outside,
not the our usual classroom setting and therefore um welcome you
today to our discussion on the topic Signed Language Use
or Signed Language Attitude, Deaf and Hearing Impaired.
um One may wonder why the topic and one may wonder the difference between
Deaf and hearing impaired; so as that being said
um in our studies so far we have found out that
there are some deaf people who have not identified
with the cultural and linguistic identity of
deaf people so in our studies we have seen more of families
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of deaf children that we have met in in terms of our studies who
continue to narrate how their children became deaf. When we
talk about Deaf and hearing impaired we mean Deaf, talking about those deaf
people that identify themselves as Deaf
culturally and linguistically, and hearing impaired talking about those
people that identify themselves as being hearing
impaired or as being uh disabled because they
lost hearing. So in that case we're going to
be talking about deafness and hearing loss so hearing
loss, whether congenital or um or organic or whatever, it is
the a situation when or a condition rather
when a person loses his or her hearing and there is an impediment or there is
an impairment of hearing and which
may affect some other aspects of that person's
general activity so in the course of our studies
we have seen more of um people who could classify as hearing impaired
whether as children, students in school and adults,
because most of the deaf persons or we have identified are those who regret
their condition or those who would want their condition to change.
This is different from some of the deaf persons who find themselves in families
um that, where maybe the father the mother
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or the grandfather and the mother are deaf and they are deaf. So we could
call second generation or third generation deaf persons. In most
cases these people identify themselves culturally and linguistically as Deaf
even if a um a hearing person is born in that family
in some cases also they identify with this culture
and they become part of the entire deaf family. These two situations,
these two settings determine the attitude of a person towards signed
language use and this is what we are going to be discussing in the next um
two three weeks. Treating this topic today, what do we
want to streamline we want to look at how deaf people
regard signed language use and their attitude towards it
and how hearing impaired regards signed language use and the attitude towards it
and this will lead us to what goes on in an average
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indigenous African Deaf community where sign language is not frivolously used
among deaf and hearing and in some other ones where they are also
used that way. The first thing I want to discuss today brothers
much on what causes hearing impairment, what causes hearing loss and I
I know this is somewhat a controversial aspect of my study but i'm going to try
as much as I can to stay within the limits of my
expertise as a sign language and speech and
hearing scientist. I have been doing research for the past
six years in Deaf communities across Africa
and there has been a whole lot of data that we have
you know collected um in amongst deaf people
and also signed language use, and one aspect of our research
that we do not always always discuss is this issue that I want to
discuss today, what causes hearing loss
in an average indigenous community. So the picture you are seeing here is a
picture of parents who narrate
who narrate how their children became deaf
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each of these parents. their children became deaf
after birth within the first five years of
of age and each of them narrates how, what they think happened.
um It is out of this um study that we got the data that informed
us that over 75 percent of the children born in
these communities that we are we have studied became deaf
because they became sick, that means they became deaf as a result of sickness.
The rest of the 25 percent, our study seems to suggest also that the reasons
some of these ones became deaf after birth may have been
an inherent reason from the mother to the children for those that were
born deaf. How did we get to this conclusion?
We got to this conclusion because each of these parents narrates
how their children became deaf, most of them
as a result of one sickness or the other that affected their hearing system
and this is about 75 percent of them by our estimate.
The rest 25 percent is estimated that the issues that affected
these ones that were born and they became deaf
after birth may have been related to those that also became deaf
before birth because the parents narrated how they, the mothers
especially how they were sick during the pregnancy
and in each of those cases they had
antibiotic injection and that leads us to um
the points that i want to make in this discussion today -
the um issue of antibiotic injection or medication or drug
for a pregnant woman or um to children, babies when they uh
when they became sick. So one of the major
um causative factor of deafness that we found out in our studies is the
antibiotic injection or drugs and in
some of the African countries especially in Nigeria where I started my studies
um a lot of antibiotic injection and drugs are used when people
fall ill. Some of us went through the system where as soon as you become
ill you you take antibiotics and so almost all these mothers narrated how
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they were given antibiotic or the
infants, when they became ill how they were given
antibiotic. This was one factor that we found out.
And another factor is when a child becomes ill runs
temperature um we also found out that some of the
parents do not know how to manage the high
temperature; some of the mothers narrated to us how
instead of dabbing the the child, the baby that is running
temperature and maybe using cold water or what, the
mother usually robs local palm kernel oil and covers the child. That is the story we got from some of these parents
and in some of those occasions the child ends up convulsing and
the child that convulses ends up losing hearing after one or two
days of coma. So some of these parents told these stories, so high temperature
and the mismanagement of it. Related to that
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is the um meningitis issue, but in in the area I started my study we
didn't see much of the meningitis issue but
it is more common in the northern part of
Nigeria because of the high heat a lot of children came down with the
high temperature and they became ill and they
became unconscious and lost their hearing in their process.
These are three major causes of hearing loss we
encounter in the course of our study. The next
which is the most controversial is the issue
of injection, any other type of injection that is called vaccine. Some of the
parents narrated that their children became ill
after taking a vaccine injection. Aas unproven as
that is, because that's not what we are dealing with in our studies
we recorded these stories from some of the parents.
I could remember one of the parents, a father
as he narrated to us how his daughter was sick
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and was due for an injection that she needed to take
and he went to a doctor friend of his and um told the doctor that the child
needed to take a vaccine injection but was having fever but the
doctor went ahead and gave the injection anyway; the child became unconscious
and lost hearing when she woke up
we had this kind of stories from some other parents and so
we know that further scientific studies can reveal
what may be the underlying cause but I'm treating this as raw as you know
data we got from the field. Alright so having explained what
causes deafness as we've seen them in and around the communities that we have
studied um what we are going to be looking at is
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these deaf persons who became deaf as children or were born deaf in this
manner whose parents continue to regret, lament
that they have deaf children what attitude was
passed to them from their parents, their immediate families and their
communities? That is where we are um having uh
the focus of our discussion. What attitude was
passed on to these children as they grew up?
What linguistic attitude what cultural attitude?
Coupled with the fact that a good number of them
grew up in isolation, a good number of them grew up with
limited language access, a good number of them grew up with no
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family or early intervention access. Now this is like a kind of foundation
to to the topic that we are gonna be dealing with
in the next two three episodes.
The other set of deaf persons, children and adults are those who
are born in a deaf family they have deaf parents and some in some
cases deaf grandparents and they inherited deafness
and they inherited the attitude, the cultural and linguistic attitude of
deafness, of being deaf what attitude did they inherit and how
do they carry this attitude? And these two settings are going to help
us into understanding the difference between
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these two deaf persons in relation to sign language. So
our topic today says Signed Language Attitude,
Deaf and Hearing Impaired, and in the next
two three weeks we are going to be dwelling on this topic
looking at um, we are going to look more on the hearing impaired, what goes on.
um Today we have talked about what causes deafness
and what causes hearing impairment and to as opposed to deafness
and we are not suggesting that those who became linguistically and culturally
deaf um the cause of their deafness is not
similar to the cause of those who identify as
hearing impaired. No, that's not what we are saying.
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Irrespective of whatever caused deafness or hearing impairment
what we are looking at is the attitude. But why did i bring up what causes
hearing impairment or hearing loss in the communities that we have studied?
To give you an idea of the attitude of the parents
coming from the way their children lost hearing and coming from
the information they have or do not have about hearing loss and deafness,
some of these parents live in regret, some
think it is their fault that their children became deaf
and in that case what do they do? And whatever they do
or do not do has a whole lot of impact on their deaf children and has a
whole lot of impact on how um the deaf child who became a deaf
adult will look at signed language. This
has a lot to do with our discussion on indigenous
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sign languages in African setting because if we
have to get it right, if we have to get it right
about the development of indigenous African signed languages
Deaf attitude towards signed language use is a huge factor; we cannot overlook it.
So today our topic is Signed Language Use or Signed Language
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Attitude, Deaf and Hearing Impaired and irrespective of what is going on
around the world, we promise to keep doing this and we ask
you to keep watching us and sharing this video
and liking it to um help spread the information that
is not readily available both in literature and in the classroom
about what goes on in indigenous deaf communities and
indigenous sign languages. I would like to say thank
you for keeping up with us and I will see you next week
stay safe from corona virus. Bye!
