Why do they need to learn how to form acquaintances?

April 8th, 2015 by Rachel | Tags: Disability, Peace Corps | 1 Comment »

In the past three days, I attended a local workshop for persons with disability on advocacy. Almost all people who were present at the workshop were persons with disability from all over the Northwest region. Many of the information at the workshop were not new for me personally due to my already having so many years of experiences in disability advocacy. There was one session that had me beating my head and wondering why the topic was so necessary to present. The session was on how to form acquaintances. From my perspective, I thought this was a joke because I thought this was something that we should already know how to do since we were children. However, I then realized that most of the other attendees at the workshop were in a much more unique situation. Most of them have never been to school all their life.

When I was a year old and my parents were still figuring out how to raise me as a child with hearing loss, a group of professionals told them that my parents needed to put me in a mainstream school as soon as possible. During those days, in the 1980’s, most deaf children were placed in schools for the deaf or self-contained classrooms with other children with disability in ordinary public schools. Even for many other people with other disabilities, they were often placed in a special school or self-contained classroom too. They explained that one of the biggest challenges that people with hearing loss face is socializing with people. They struggle more in learning how to interact with human beings due to communication barriers and stigmatization from other people. So, the professionals explained that by placing me in a mainstream school as early as possible, I would have a head start in learning how to communicate and interact with the hearing peers. The other reason was also to ensure that I would be able to develop good listening and spoken language skills by being surrounded by hearing peers. My parents put me in a daycare-preschool when I was 17 months old. From that time until when I received a Master’s degree, I was in mainstream school all my life. Attending mainstream school all throughout my life has clearly served me well, especially starting it at a very young age. Forming friends and interacting with people was natural for me. I remember very well on the very first day of Kindergarten, a blonde hair girl named, Allison, sat next to me and we both clicked right away. We became best friends very quickly. I recall that I was truly an ordinary kindergartener as I had moments when I talked or giggled too much and the teacher told me on a couple occasions to sit in a “time-out” chair. I also had another best friend, named Bailey, who lived two doors from my house. Almost everyday, we visited each other’s homes and played after school and on the weekends. All throughout my schooling years, I continued to make friends with ease both in schools and neighborhood.

Rachel in Preschool

However, unfortunately, most Cameroonians with disability do not have this same fortunate that I have been afforded. As I have mentioned in my previous blog posts, only 2% of all Cameroonians with disability have attended school. This means that they have rarely left home to have the opportunity to interact with the world outside of their home. School was not just a place to acquire education. It was also a place to learn how to connect with other human beings. One of the primary reasons many parents send children to preschool is to have them learn how to make friends, play with other children, share toys, and communicate with other people. Teaching children how to interact with people around them starts at a very young age.

Even when there were other children around in the neighborhood, many persons with disability were still not able to interact with them. While stigmatization was one of the main reasons, there were other reasons. For deaf children, almost all of them didn’t have hearing aids or cochlear implants and so that meant that they had no aid in understanding what their neighbors were saying. Even if the deaf children knew sign language, most neighbors didn’t know sign language. For those with mobility disability, they couldn’t run and keep up with the pace of children moving quickly. For those who had no assistive devices such as crutches or wheelchairs, they couldn’t move at all. This meant that whenever the neighborhood children were gathering and interacting with each other, often times, children with mobility disability were sitting several feet away from them and far removed socialization. One of my work partners who has had a mobility disability since she was a baby told me that there were times she would be left out of the social groups and be calling out to them and asking them to help her move close to the group so that she could be part of the interactions. For those who are visually impaired, they couldn’t see where children were interacting and faced the difficulty of locating them.

So, after thinking about my childhood years and comparing them with persons with disability living in Cameroon, I realized that forming acquaintances is actually a challenge for many persons with disability in Cameroon. This is because most of them had lack of exposure to socialization. They didn’t attend school. They likely also faced the barrier of connecting with their neighbors when growing up. Their experiences further prove the importance of ensuring that all persons with disability have the access to mainstream schools and appropriate assistive devices to maximize their ability to connect with other human beings.