By Dumisani Ndlovu
Disability activists, sign language graduates and tutors have called for an urgent need for government to ensure that all public service officials learn to communicate in sign language.Speaking at Mtapa Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) church sign language graduation ceremony, Sunrise Sign Language Academy, founder and Chairperson, Douglas Mapeta urged public officers to enrol in sign language courses.
“The reason why we are here in Gweru is that we are singing with the country with the President’s mantra of leaving no one and no place behind. How, by training sign language and also inclusion of people with disabilities
“Promoting their rights to be recognized in every facet of life and we are training each and everyone, including public servants, teachers, nurses, doctors and people of the society so that we become inclusive of what we do. We can see here we are at a church, we are saying churches must be inclusive as far as possible,” he said.
Speaking on the side-lines of the graduation of 30 sign language students at in Gweru scores of graduates and program coordinators echoed similar sentiments.
“I got encourages because I have a friend who is deaf, initially I found it difficult to communicate with her. That’s what made me enrol with the Sunrise Sign Language academy. Now that I am trained I can easily communicate with her,” she said Leona Ropafadzo Mbengo. Mbengo also challenged other students to train sign language for easy communication skills with the deaf community.
Petronella Zanele Moyo echoed similar sentiment, saying had a childhood friend whom she faced difficulties to communicate with.
“I have a deaf friend whom I started befriending since childhood, I couldn’t communicate with her to an extent of writing down what I wanted to communicate. I thank Sunrise Academy for the opportunity to learn”
” Now I can easily articulate issues in sign language, “she said.
Tendai Zivanayi said “What prompted me to learn the sign language is that as a teacher there are people with hearing impairment at my school, most of us couldn’t communicate with them. This made me eager to learn so that I bridge communication gap between teachers and students’ am happy we were taught the Alphabet, numbers and colours, this has helped me a lot. I am also going to empower more staff,” said Zivanayi.
Mtapa SDA sign language pre-school Administrator Sithembile Mukwenda after having realised communication gap in the church, they decided to make the churches services understandable by incorporating sign-language interpreters making our differently abled people follow church proceedings and surmonies.
Commenting on the development, Disability activist Moses Magazine said such trainings are very important especially in response to the increasing number of gender-based violence (GBV) cases involving hearing-impaired people.
“This was a good move, this should go far and wide. Sign language should also reach court so that that the country’s justice system start to accommodate deaf people”
“As we speak, there might be a number of cases of abuse that go unreported, merely because police stations and social workers are not equipped to effectively communicate with deaf people,” said Magazine adding that addressing challenges facing hearing-impaired people must be a permanent project and not only an awareness issue during a specific month.
‘One month is not enough to address the challenges. Permanent and tangible solutions must be found.
‘We believe the introduction of sign language lessons in government departments will dismantle all the barriers,’ said the clear spoken Magazine.
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