It was a long shot ... pointing to the lifeless plant on the pharmacy counter and imitating pouring water into it and miming a recovering plant and then pointing to myself. But it got me my rehydration sachets.
Removed from the comfort zone of effortless communication using their native language, lots of travelers freeze or start shouting. Or they'll head overseas armed with a little phrasebook and join tours with guides who speak their language. Deaf travelers go equipped with a lifetime's experience of finding creative solutions to communication obstacles.
Having been born deaf, dealing with this has become part of my daily life to the point that I don't even notice it now. And it comes in very handy when traveling. Coupled with attitudes towards deafness around the world, that are, let us say, interesting, it ensures lots of memorable experiences.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
In places where politically correct language and attitudes haven't arrived, people are free to describe deafness in gloriously insulting ways. Like the leather goods seller who ran up to me and my friend in Djemma el-Fna in Marrakech, saying his brother "was, was, was ..." -- he was clearly searching for a word that would convey "deaf." We waited with anticipation, what would he come up with? Eventually, he gave up and enthusiastically mimed chopping off his tongue, then was delighted when we pointed at our ears and nodded in agreement.
From Hanoi all the way south to Saigon, locals used goldfish-like mouth movements accompanied with raised eyebrows and questioning expressions to symbolize deafness. But, you know what? Give me that any day over the phrases considered PC in Britain: "hearing challenged" or "hearing impaired," to skirt around the fact that I am, at the end of the day, bloody deaf. In the supposedly "backward" cultures of the developing world, people point and gesture. "You deaf?" Then they shrug in mild interest or laugh and elbow each other in fascination. Either way, they never seem to recede in awkwardness or embarrassment; rather than stumbling around the elephant in the room, they're prodding it, feeding it ... I love every bit of it.
In Western cultures, where showing undue interest in someone's personal life is held to be impolite, people can feel it's off limits to ask me about being deaf, hovering round the issue and hushing their five-year-old for asking what they, too, want to know. Not so in places where people wear curiosity on their sleeve. During my travels in Asia and North Africa, I've had plenty of people walk up and ask why my voice sounds funny, followed by a long interrogation on what it's like to be deaf. And my hearing aids are a source of fascination abroad. When a bunch of kids in Angkor Wat in Cambodia saw them, they abandoned their hard-sell hawking of souvenirs and told me to take them off so they could have a look. They each took their time examining the small brown contraptions before unleashing a flurry of questions: What were they for, what could I hear with or without them, why did I speak funny (again)?
But this gave me an opening to find out about their lives: I could ask them about working, whether they went to school, their families. As I prepared to set off on my bike, one of them gave me a bracelet, refusing payment because I was her friend. One advantage of being deaf is that it can set you apart from the zillions of backpackers passing through tourist-weary countries, and locals take an interest in you. No common spoken language? Pas de probleme. Deaf travelers use gesture and body language.
A friend and I picked up a hitchhiker in the Moroccan countryside who brought the goat she had cleverly hidden behind a rock into our car and later ordered us to help her carry bags of goat feed from the car to her house. In return we were invited in and after we forced down some bread with goat's butter washed down with goat's milk followed by goat's yoghurt for dessert, we sat back for a chat over mint tea with several shovels of sugar. She told us all about her children and their families, her upbringing, the royal wedding being shown on TV. We told her how we knew each other and about our travels. Not a word of English was uttered.
Using one's body and face to communicate can also have financial uses: I've managed to haggle speeding fines down to a quarter of the going rate on various occasions.
The attitudes abroad have taught me a lot too.
We have all kinds of equality laws in Europe. The government-funded access-to-work package ensures that deaf people have minicoms, interpreters and other resources in the workplace. All of which is vital to equality, no doubt. But in Bangkok I met many deaf people working on stalls. Vibrant body communication and a calculator was their only means of "access," yet they went at their jobs with gusto, one woman telling me and my friends to "Wait, wait, wait" so she could go off and snare two American tourists and sell them all kinds of things they obviously hadn't intended buying. Would government funding for an interpreter have helped her?
Hue in North Vietnam has three restaurants clustered together all run by deaf men who compete viciously for customers. With their mention in the Lonely Planet, all three restaurants were bustling when I went -- this in a country light years away from equality law. It's a good reminder that while there's more to be done to ensure deaf people enjoy equality, most of it is down to the right frame of mind.
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