The doorbell rings. You do not answer because you don’t hear it. Your baby cries, unheeded. You live amid colour and motion but… in a world of silence you are deaf.
The isolation of the elderly deaf and their almost inconceivable problems of communication are seldom realized. They are the more handicapped because they have not had the advantages of today’s advanced teaching methods for deaf children.
It is for this group, says Mr T. G. Fear, social welfare officer and organizing secretary of The Friends of the Deaf (Inc.) in Auckland, that the organization hopes to provide housing and have acquired land near the Deaf Welfare Centre in Balmoral Road. On this they hope to build several units, to be known as the Eddowes memorial village for the elderly deaf.
“The problems of age are so much worse if you are deaf as well,” said Mr Fear. “The person born deaf, always having had problems of communication, earns less than his colleague who can hear. For this reason, when he reaches retirement he does not always own his own house and has accommodation problems. Sometimes a deaf person who has been cared for by parents well into middle-age is left alone in the world, or one of a married couple dies leaving the partner bereft. It is for people such as these that we hope to provide housing.”
NZ’s facilities for teaching deaf children were far in advance of those of many other countries, said Mr Fear, and to this extent today’s deaf baby would suffer far less in adulthood than today’s elderly deaf. “People with hearing do not realize that people born deaf have difficulty understanding abstract meanings. One can indicate extremes such as hot and cold but it is difficult, for instance, to indicate the in-between temperatures such as cool or luke-warm.
“There is always this enormous problem of communication particularly with the older generation. Very often the deaf person and the hearing person just cannot understand each other.”
Elderly deaf people often needed help with filling in papers such as social security forms, explained Mr Fear. They were unable to hear their doorbells ringing and when they wanted taxis had to have someone call one for them.
They also tended to associate mainly with people similarly handicapped because each understood the other’s difficulty. If these people were living in a village it would be easier to assist them and they would probably be happier.
Picture caption: Mr T. G. Fear, social welfare officer and organizing secretary of the Friends of the Deaf (Inc) talking to deaf adults in their clubrooms at the Deaf Welfare Centre, Balmoral Rd, Auckland. Most of these folk lip-read.
