The Children Who Listen with Their Eyes
Tibor Krausz

The Mary Chapman School for the Deaf in Yangon is countering entrenched traditional prejudices against the disabled by helping deaf children get a head start for their future

 By Tibor Krausz

In the impoverished rural hinterlands of Kayah state, career prospects are scarce even for the able-bodied. All the more so then for people with disabilities. Little outside the home is expected of them. Handicaps like deafness are seen not just as physical disadvantages to overcome with effort and perseverance but as insurmountable limitations to bear without much hope. Their disability marks deaf children for life; it defines them.
 

Not Naw Shay Myar, however. The pretty 17-year-old girl from a hardscrabble village of Kayah state in Myanmar's northeast has been profoundly deaf since birth. Yet that does not prevent her from nurturing great aspirations. She wants to be a Bible teacher, she says. For the past 13 years, Naw Shay Myar has been a student at the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf in Yangon and is now in the 10th grade. She will be graduating soon but would love to stay here and teach Bible to younger students. This is where she has learned that she is no less a whole person than anyone else, and she wants to guide other deaf children on similar paths of mental and spiritual growth.
 

That is why her favorite prayer is Psalm 23, she explains. People in distress have throughout the ages found solace in this famous psalm. Her sense of awe clearly not dulled by countless recitals, she recites it on request:

"The Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul and leads me in the paths of righteousness. Yea, although I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.... Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Through Naw Shay Myar, the psalm takes on a new, almost mystical dimension. Instead of the familiar words, the girl recites the psalm through sign language. The words pirouette in a ballet of nimble fingers and whirl in flourishes of graceful hands, mimicking the cadences of supple verse through practiced yet emotive gestures.
 

Lacking familiarity with their world, I used to image deaf people as locked in an aural vacuum where interpersonal communications were restricted to snatches of essentials -- as if you had to live your entire life in a soundproof cell with impenetrable glass walls through which to relate to people on the outside. After the first 10 minutes of my visit to the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf on Thantaman Street in a leafy, relatively upscale residential area of Yangon, I realize the extent of my ignorance.
 

The kids in the school, ranging in age from four-year-olds to girls and boys well in their teenage years, are like any other children. They are chatting, joking, teasing one another through sign language. Their hands are aided by adroit pantomime and punctuated by super-animated facial expressions: dilated eyes stress, jiggery eyebrows exclaim, pursed lips question. With practiced manual dexterity and elastic facial alacrity that would put Jim Carrey to shame, they semaphore verbal nuances and emotive inflections. They seem to have a lingo of all their own: the mere flashing of a hand sign by one girl elicits an instant chortling guffaw in her friend.
 

Yet even during horseplay the deaf children appear extra careful not to barge in on friends unawares from behind lest they startle their fellows by "stealing" up on them from outside their field of vision. "We are so happy here," Naw Shay Myar explains through a teacher who interprets her signs for me. "Everybody has so many friends."
 

At present, 345 pupils study in the school. They come from all over Myanmar, representing the amazing anthropological palette of minorities and hilltribes in the country. Written in the rotund characters of the Burmese alphabet, a note pinned on a blackboard in the main five-storey building's lobby lists the school's ethnic diversity: "Our students: 225 Burmese, 29 Karen, 20 Indian, 19 Kachin, 16 Chin, 9 Chinese, 9 Mon, 5 Shan, 5 Lisu, 4 Kayah, 1 Wa...." (Minorities account for a third of Myanmar's 43 million people.) The children make for a similar ecumenical medley. Most come from families belonging to a wide range of Christian denominations from Pentecostals to Catholics. But many are Buddhists, Hindus and animists.
 

Buddhists monks, evangelical pastors, Catholic priests, and visiting foreigners all do their part in helping deaf children in impoverished villages from all over Myanmar find their way to the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf in Yangon. They alert the school's management of deaf children languishing unattended in poor households and often sponsor the children throughout their studies. Lodging and boarding for a pupil for an entire school year costs 150,000 kyat ($150), a pittance by Western standards but a fortune for most people in Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia's poorest countries.
 

Both brothers of Naw Shay Myar have studied in the school for the deaf. Her parents are first cousins married according to custom in the close-knit tribal ways of the Kayah people. Their incestuous union has left its mark on their three children. A local missionary brought Naw Shay Myar and her brothers to the school. Her older brother, a rare dropout, now makes a living as a bicycle repairman.
 

"Deaf children are smart and handy. Their deafness is the only problem with them. Some become good tailors, some become skilled hairdressers, some even become taxi drivers," says Daw Hla Yi, the school's elderly, articulate treasurer who speaks almost flawless, colloquial English. "In our culture, disabled children are considered ill-fated and often they are not well looked-after. We have to give them an opportunity to live up to their potential," she explains. "Ultimately, though, their fate is in their parents' hand -- whether they let them come here to study or don't let them."

Ma San San Wai certainly does. A petite woman of around 40, she has come to the school today to discuss with the principal the post-graduation prospects of her 17-year-old son, Mg Thar Si Thu, a tall, gawky 10th grader with the bashful awkwardness of teenagers. Her husband, she says, died last year and her only child is the apple of her eye. He has been a student here since the age of six.
 

"I have known about this school since my son was two," Ma San San Wai says. "If we had stayed in the village, my son would have had no future." The family lived in a hamlet on the muddy banks of the Ayeyarwady River; when the boy reached school age, the parents picked up their meager belongings and moved to Yangon. Only in the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf could Mg Thar Si Thu study and look forward to a brighter future, she says. Her son agrees, "I like it here very much. It is good for me because every other kid is like me."
 

Mary Chapman would be proud.
 

An English lady living in colonial-era Rangoon, she rented a house on Shan Road and turned into a school for the deaf in 1920. Back then, societal prejudice in Burma against the deaf, the blind, and people with various other forms of disabilities appeared almost insurmountable. The Burmese, pious Buddhists as they were (and are today), considered birth defects as karmic debts incurred by the disabled through immoral actions perpetrated in previous lives. Only a penitential lifetime spent in silent virtuous endurance of their "curse" could liberate disabled people like the deaf from the yoke of physical and spiritual imperfections. They could be reborn whole again in their next incarnation.
 

Mary Chapman took issue with that view. At first, only a single student attended her special school. Parents of deaf and mute children did not think their offspring could be taught to read and write, much less speak (through sign language). Yet within three years Mary Chapman had moved her pioneering school to its current location on 2 Thantaman Street and built a wooden house on the premises. It became the Mary Chapman Training College for Teachers & School for the Deaf with the motto "For the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ." A year later the first Burmese teacher, Daw Sein Tha, joined the devout Anglican woman in her charitable enterprise. Over a dozen students attended classes in lips-reading, finger-spelling, sign language, arithmetic, Burmese, English, reading, writing, and "nature study."
 

"Miss Chapman had a great love for people," says Daw Khin May Sint, the matronly 79-year-old principal who is just retiring after almost two decades at the helm of the institution. "She was a most unselfish and compassionate individual."
 

The exacting climate and tropical diseases took their toll on the Englishwoman, however, and by 1930 she had been compelled to return to England for good. Her school, though, would carry on in her absence. In the mid-1930s already over two dozen students studied there. The Japanese invasion of Burma during the Second World War briefly brought the shutters down on the school. In post-war years, however, tutoring picked up again unabated. In 1953, donations from Swiss Christians paid for the construction of a new stone building, which then housed some 80 students.
 

In 1984, a German Christian mission sponsored another building on the east wing and by the mid-1990s the student population had more than doubled to 183 under the tutelage of 12 teachers and five trainees. Seeing its popularity, the government licensed the school to teach deaf children not only at the primary but also at the secondary level all the way up to 11th grade. Their degrees would be officially recognized. Two recent graduates of the school have since gone on to college and received Bachelor's degrees in zoology and biology, respectively. Their examples stand as shining encouragements for all deaf children at the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf, Principal Daw Khin May Sint stresses.
 

Beyond teaching its pupils in the national curricula, the institution also provides them with vocational training. In workshops the industrious children learn to sew, to knit, to embroider. They practice dress-making, macram‚, crochet. Two of the teachers who train students in vocational classes are deaf themselves. Children also learn the knacks of animal husbandry by raising 200 hens. A few cats and dogs keep them welcome pet company.
 

"We have a 12-year-old student who is both blind and deaf," Daw Khin May Sint says. (The girl has lost her sight and hearing to ravaging jungle fever.) "She is very agile with her fingers. She loves weaving and produces six meters of weaving every day."
 

To supplement the school's ever-wanting finances, the children's exquisite handmade creations are sold on the premises. A mere 1,000 kyat ($1) buys a finely woven pillowcase. Some of the earnings enrich the children directly: a student receives 30 kyat a day (or about 3 cents) in pocket money. Relative prosperity here defies pampered Westerner's cosseted view of "wealth." A boarder's pin money for a whole year is 3,500 kyat, less than a dollar. For a Western tourist in Myanmar, that buys a can of coke in a restaurant.
 

Most boarders in the school come from penurious families in the countryside; there are 160 of such students living in the school's dormitories -- large classrooms turned into barracks-like living quarters without partitions. The children bed down on mattresses laid on the bare parquet floor; 15 to 20 of them occupy one side of the room, as many the other side with the rest down the middle. Sons and daughters of subsistence farmers, most of them come from hilltribe-type longhouses, where dozens of families eat, cook, and sleep together. The children do not want for Western-style privacy, explains U S Robert, the school's accountant. Such intimacy day and night among students also fosters indelible bonds of camaraderie, he adds. A bespectacled man with the no-nonsense efficacy of a bureaucrat and the serene cordiality of a true-blue educator, he comes from just such a longhouse himself in a village of Karen state.
 

The dormitories are spotlessly clean. Crisp, newly washed colorful longyis (Burmese sarongs) and white shirts are drying on clothes lines. A 13-year-old girl is making her rounds around them with a broom. U S Robert, who is highly adept at speaking with students in sign language, leads me to the school's "library" next door. It's a small room with glass doors housing two heaps of books piled on the floor -- mostly comic books as well as Burmese juvenile novels and fantasies. The school would love to replenish the library's stock with more weighty educational materials, but "funds are much needed," the accountant notes matter-of-factly. "We have to make do with what we have."
 

Daw Say Ler sleeps in the dormitories too. She occupies a mattress laid atop a wooden bed frame in a corner, which grants her an elevated vantage point from where to guard the children's sleep. She is 52, single, and has worked at the school for 30 years. "I sleep with them, study with them, play with them," she explains. "They are my family."
 

Like all 29 teachers in the school, she is a Karen Christian. Many Karen remain Buddhists and animists, yet a number of them are Christians, generally Anglicans, as a religious legacy of British missionaries from during the colonial era. Although teachers at the school do not press pagan children into converting, the institution operates on a distinctly Christian flavor. At 6pm every day, the students gather for vespers.
 

"We stress fundamental ethics and morality common to all faiths and religions," Principal Daw Khin May Sint notes. She is the granddaughter of one of the first native priests in upper Burma and is married to an Anglican assistant bishop. She was once the first woman vice president of the Myanmar Council of Churches. "God created every person in His image and it's our duty to help people less fortunate than us," she goes on to explain. "But social work is not something to brag about. You do it for the love of God and for the love of people."
 

Teachers at the school earn between 4,000 and 5,000 kyat a month ($1 and $1.25), plus free boarding and lodging. They have given up comparatively more lucrative occupations for the sake of teaching here. Daw Say Ler, for one, long ago reneged on a life and family of her own. A kindly soul with large thick grandma spectacles and a ready bucktoothed smile, she explains amicably in chirpy Burmese as U S Robert translates her words into English for my sake: "When I was 20, I joined this school. I only wanted to stay for a few years, but I just couldn't leave. I think God wanted me to stay here."
 

A shy little girl detaches herself from a gaggle of animatedly gesticulating children, comes over to inspect what this strange foreigner with a notebook in his hand might be up to, observes the interview in progress for a while, then timidly snuggles up to Daw Say Ler. "They listen with their eyes, you see," the teacher says. She strokes the little girl's head and adds: "They are all very dear to us, so close to our hearts, because they need us. But they don't want pity and sympathy. They want affection and empathy."
 

The little girl is Ma Lei Mei. A delicate jasmine of a girl from Kachin state, she is 10 and is in 4th grade. Last December, she proudly tells me through a teacher in excited hand signs, she won first prize for dancing on Disabled Day during a special gala for disabled children from all over Myanmar. "I love drawing landscapes and flowers," she says, then explains with the casual insight of precocious kids: "We are deaf and the teachers here understand us and help us very much. We learn many things we could not learn anywhere else."
 

Several other pupils amble over to try and listen with their eyes. Some of the braver spirits decide to flaunt their English skills to this strange, unexpected visitor.
 

Mg Myo Ning, a 12-year-old energetic little dervish with bristly hair from Dawei on the Andaman Sea in southern Myanmar, flashes a 1,000-watt smile and sticks up a thumb in an OK hand sign. He asks to borrow my pen and notebook and scribbles "HOw arE yuo. nicE to mEt yuo." He waits for my reply, then carries on: "My namE is" -- he pauses and looks up at his teacher with a smirk/half-smile of slight embarrassment. Mg Myo Ning needs to spell his name in English. "I knew it, but I forgot," he apologizes with hand signs, shrugging his shoulders.
 

No worries. He is here to learn all that and much, much more.