2 Weeks Until Los Moches!

Two weeks from today (on my birthday) I will be getting on a plane and flying to the deaf school in Los Moches! Everyone I've talked to that has been to Los Moches loves the place, so I'm pretty excited to get down there and check it out for myself. I'm also sad that I'm going to spending a whole three weeks away from the ranch and the kids here, but I'm sure I'll love the students down there as well!

Drew Lund's Mexican Adventures: A Strange View of Ordinary

Drew Lund's Mexican Adventures: A Strange View of Ordinary:
The past few weeks have gone by without anything I would call "out of the ordinary" happening. I've just been keeping up with my regular tasks at the ranch, not doing anything exceptionally spectacular. Nothing strange, just the normal, everyday life of Rancho Sordo Mudo. This morning I saw that it's been several weeks since my last post on the blog so I wanted to write something to update all of my friends and family back home, but I sat there for a few minutes, stumped. I couldn't think of a single exceptionally-interesting thing that had happened for almost a month. But when I started thinking of my life over the past month and comparing it to my life back in America, I realized something: I have a very strange view of ordinary.

On an average day, I eat all three meals with the kids. After breakfast I assist in teaching a chapel class (basically Sunday School, except for 30 minutes every day instead of just once a week). I also often oversee a group of boys after lunch as they do various cleaning and yard work projects around the ranch. Then after dinner I hang out with the kids on the playground and play basketball, soccer or even volleyball for an hour or so before they head back to the dorms for the night. A couple times a week I'll go back with the the boys and help watch them until they go to bed.

So that's about what a typical day is at the ranch for me. Sounds normal enough, right? Well, there's one little aspect of the ranch that changes everything. The majority of the people on the ranch--all of the students and several of the staff--are deaf. This means they can't hear the bells that precede every meal or the bell that tells us it's time for prayer, so we need a flashing light that this kids can see to go with it. When they pray before we eat, they do it in sign language, not english. When I teach chapel class it can't involve any kind of sound, only drawings on the white board and signing. If I need to talk to one of the kids during a work project and they're far away from me, I can't just yell to get their attention. I either have to wave my arms until they see me or just run up and tap them on the shoulder. Even playing sports with them is a different experience. Yelling someone's name or "I'm open!" will do you no good, just like shouting "head's up!" will make them no more aware of the ball that's about to smack them on the skull. After that when I hang out with the kids in the dorm and we talk about the day or whatever else is on their minds, I still can't use my voice. The only way they understand me is when I speak not with my voice, but with my hands.

Even if you take out all of the other aspects of living with the deaf students here, simply speaking in sign language is a pretty big difference from speaking with hearing people. For starters, you can't just glance away if you see or hear something happening nearby. For deaf people, that's about what it would feel like if you were talking with a hearing person and they just stuck their fingers in their ears for a few seconds. It's rude. You have to stay focused on the person you're speaking with at all times. Also, when you sign a word, the way you sign it is extremely important. I slight movement from your head or a change in your facial expression can completely alter the meaning of a sign. Then if I want to talk about my family, I can't just say their names. I have to finger spell S-P-E-N-C-E-R and C-O-R-Y every time I want to talk about my brothers. And it doesn't matter how descriptive you are, talking about that weird sound that woke you up last night will never make sense. Even as I was writing part of this I with my friends Noemy and David, and Noemy and I started laughing because we heard a cd skipping in a cd player nearby. When David asked why we were laughing and Noemy tried to explain the idea of a song that's stuck and keeps repeating the same sound over and over to a person that can't even hear music in the first place, he just shrugged and went back to the conversation. And even though they're still talking to each other right next to me at this very moment, I have no trouble focusing on typing because they don't have to make a sound to communicate so there's nothing to distract me.

After explaining all of this, it pretty much goes without saying that everyday life here at the ranch is by no means normal when compared to my life before moving to Mexico (and I haven't even touched on all of the things that are different because I'm in a third-world country that doesn't have access to things like clean water that comes out a of a faucet). Things like having a two hour, one-on-one conversation in sign language just doesn't feel strange to me anymore. And while this may seem like a strange view of ordinary to my friends and family back home, I've come to understand that strange is just a matter of perspective.