Hello Neighbor! I apologize for the delay of blogging; my Lenten compromise is to journal daily, which has drastically cut down on the blogging. I, however, need to maintain both. There has not been a great deal to report on. Some topics to discuss are a surprise visitor to our deaf school and St. Paddy's Day weekend.
Primarily, the surprise visitor to our school. On this past Monday, 35 or so students from Galludet University located in Washington D.C. came to our school and "signed" a wonderful assembly. Galludet is an all deaf university in the USA. It was awesome to see the interaction between Costa Rican signers and ASL(American Sign Language) signers. They are not the same language, so communication was slow and usually assisted by 3 or 4 interpreters that traveled with the Galludet contingent. I was hard pressed to believe that there was a great distinction between CR sign language and ASL; but I learned quickly by experience that there is. This was a bit disheartening because when i return to the US, I will need to learn another sign language, but this feeling of let down was lifted when the one of the interpreters told me that learning one sign language makes learning the second that much easier; not to mention that ASL has books, DVDs, courses and opportunities galore to put yourself in a great spot to learn ASL; I look forward to that challenge.
The main reason for their visit was to donate "TTY" telephones to the school to distribute to the students. What is a TTY? From our friends at Wikipedia, it is as follows:
"The typical TTY is a device about the size of a small laptop computer with a QWERTY keyboard and small screen that uses LEDs or an LCD screen to display typed text electronically. In addition, TTYs commonly have a small spool of paper on which text is also printed — old versions of the device had only a printer and no screen. The text is transmitted live, via a telephone line, to a compatible device, i.e. one that uses a similar communication protocol. In certain countries there are systems in place so that a deaf person can communicate with a hearing person on an ordinary voice phone using a human relay operator. "
It basically relays messages from a deaf typist to an operator who relays the message to the hearing receiver.
In other more simple news, St. Patty's Day in Costa Rica is near nonexistent. I did not let that stop the festivities. On Saturday, Erin and I enjoyed a viewing of "The Departed" and I enjoyed some whiskey; solid and simple evening. Then on the "official" day, I made homemade Irish Soda Bread in the trusty cast-iron skillet. The community and I shared some soda bread and conversation after a nice dinner on March 17th...topped off with some green milk!
