Children Of A Lesser God, a play that tackles the communication problems faced by deaf people, opens at Circa Theatre tomorrow night. Suzanne Pollard talks to two of the cast, Miranda and Kate Harcourt, left, about their roles, and to Jenny Griffiths, the mother of two profoundly deaf children.
Maria and Gareth Griffiths look like a couple of ordinary kids — bright, happy, healthy and full of mischief.
It’s only when you talk to them, or they have something to say to you, that you notice they aren’t as ordinary as they first seem.
Their mother, Jenny Griffiths, noticed it when Gareth was just a few months old. Doors would slam, the phone would ring and people would come and go without him ever registering.
When Maria was born three years later the same symptoms were obvious from an even earlier age. Though she has had their parents and many hearing problems, Gareth and Maria are profoundly deaf. The odds of such an occurrence are probably incalculable. There is no medial explanation for the children’s deafness.
There are about 2000 deaf children in New Zealand, but no one really knows the figures for deaf or partly deaf adults.
Lip reading was the most favoured method of communication for the deaf till eight years ago when the Australasian Total Communication (TC) system came into vogue.
“TC is everything — signing, finger spelling, the written word, mime, lots of body language,” Jenny Griffiths says.
“It took me about two years to become fluent and both the children are becoming fluent now. It is just a gradual process. We just introduce new words as we come to them.”
“It can be very frustrating when you forget a sign. You just have to rush over to the book and hope you can find it there.
“It certainly isn’t easy. It’s actually jolly difficult.”
The idea behind promoting lip reading in the past was to make deaf people appear as inconspicuous or “normal” as possible, says Rachel Locker, field officer for the deaf in Wellington, says.
“The generation who are adults now were never allowed to use sign language officially. They had great difficulty learning English so their literacy skills are, generally speaking, pretty low and that can be a big problem for them. But the Griffiths children should be different.”
Jenny started teaching Gareth lip reading when he was a toddler, because that was what doctors told her to do. By the time he was 3 ½ she realised the limitations of lip reading and felt they weren’t making the progress they should be. She switched to TC and Gareth has never looked back. Maria, 6, learned TC from the start.
Jenny says their comprehension skills are equal to those of their hearing contemporaries.
Gareth, 9, attends Karori Normal School, his local primary school.
“He is mainstreamed with the help of an itinerant teacher. His classroom teacher last year was also using TC with him, so he was lucky.”
Maria is in a unit at the Aro School where TC is used all the time. There are five other deaf children in the unit, but she is mainstreamed for most of the day. She is in the unit for maths and language.
While Maria has deaf classmates to “talk” to, Gareth’s school friends all have hearing.
“But they are all able to communicate with him. They know about him because they’ve grown up with him as he is. His school friends have picked up a lot of sign language.”
Both the children are happy at school, and Jenny says the fact they have each other at home must help them overcome the loneliness that deaf people so often feel.
“It is a really big advantage for them having each other because they can communicate easily all the time.
“In a crowded situation they get very frustrated when they’re not kept up with everything, if someone is not interpreting for them the whole time. If they miss something and they know it was funny because everyone laughed, they get very frustrated.”
Both the children have hearing aids, but the most they do is make them aware of loud noises. They cannot understand voices, and their own speech is intelligible only to their family.
“If Gareth has his hearing aids on he knows when we’re talking. He can hear our voices, recognise our voices, but he doesn’t hear the words properly.”
“Maria’s voice is understandable to me, to our family, and I imagine to the people involved with her at school. But her speech wouldn’t be intelligible to other people. Gareth’s speech isn’t so good.”
Rachel Locker says not all deaf people want to be able to speak.
“It varies. With the deaf adults I deal with their speech would be very difficult for an ordinary outsider to understand. It depends a lot on the pressures they have had from home. Because their parents were taught they had to be oral, a lot of them have this thing that speaking is good and signing is bad, but at the same time their speech is unintelligible.
“Most deaf people come to terms with the fact that most hearing people aren’t going to understand them, and they aren’t going to understand most hearing people. They have to deal with that on an everyday basis in their lives.
“Some might worry about not being able to speak, but most don’t mind. When they’re communicating with other deaf people, which is usually their primary social contact, voices aren’t needed at all.”
With TC Jenny says it is possible to communicate personal feelings and discuss in detail a wide range of ideas and concepts. One of the reasons she decided lip reading wasn’t satisfactory was the difficulty in relating feelings.
“The first signs I learned were the feelings. I was able to then ask Gareth how he felt. It was a real breakthrough.
“Now we talk about anything – about the planets, or about a game of cricket – we can talk about all the intricacies.”
Gareth and Maria both play sport and Jenny says it is an ideal interest for deaf youngsters.
“Sport is great. Most sports are not verbal. People keep commenting on the speed with which they pick up things, like gymnastics and swimming. They are much quicker than hearing children because they concentrate so carefully, watching for each clue. They want to get it exactly right; that is common with most deaf people.”
The children enjoy watching television – cartoons, action programmes and wildlife documentaries being favourites because they can still be appreciated without hearing the dialogue.
While they are keeping up with their classmates now, Jenny knows it is going to get a lot tougher for her children when they get to secondary school. The more complex subjects become, the more extra effort is going to be needed for them to keep up.
“But I don’t look ahead with any gloom, I look ahead with hope,” Jenny says. “They’re both intelligent kids, and if that helps, and their environment is accepting of them and their special needs. We’ve struck many people who will go out of their way to help them”
Most people feel inadequate when they first meet the children because they don’t know how to communicate with them, Jenny says.
“Most people simply haven’t come across deafness before so they’re totally at a loss about what to do. But as soon as they’re filled in on how to communicate with the children, they want to. It seems to open up a whole new world for some people.”
Jenny’s aim is for her children to be able to live independent lives and make their own way in the world when they are adults. “I want the kids to be able to go into a shop and communicate what they want. What we’re striving for is independence so they can cope in a world that is seeing and hearing.”
