Deaf in Mongolia
Wow, what a day, everything just fell into place. I have never been one to believe in a lot of coincidences, but today I did.
I have been trying to find out about the local Deaf community here in Mongolia & thus far have not had any success. At first I used my little Mongolian phrasebook & a lot of mime & gesture, without any success, then I had a note written in Mongolian to say that I was looking for a Sign Language dictionary in Mongolian, again, without much success.
However, I did find a woman that operates a shop that sells Mongolian crafts, who is originally from Ireland (from memory) & she tried to find out some information for me, whilst we went on our 20 day tour. She did find out the name of the shop where you can buy one, but apparently they don’t have any in stock.
We had planned to leave by about 10.30/ 11 to see her again to see if there was any way that I could source a SL book & due to all the rain earlier in the morning (well most of the night too) the streets were flooded, so we were going the long way to avoid the deep puddles of water & just past the State Department Store (outside of the Adidas shop) I saw 2 people signing. Holy shit!!!! Needless to say I was a little excited & tried to converse with them in SL. One man was Deaf the other hearing. After fumbling around with a bit of sign & managing to point to a few phrases in my phrasebook & sign a little, I showed him my paper, which said that I was looking for a Mongolian Sign Language book. He tried to show me on my shitty little tourist map where to go (that whole section was missing from my map) and in the end told us to come with him & he drove us to a Deaf Church, The Sunrise Centre.
We were there for about 3 hours, chatting to everyone. We had a bit of a tour of the building, looked at where the children can play, plus the actual room, where they have church services. They were a congregation of 400, but many people have moved from the city to the country, so there are 200 now. They had a big gym area (basketball court) as well for different social days that happen. Unfortunately, we will miss out on the 2 that are coming up, 18th & 25th July, (our visa’s expire on the 17th & to extend your visa you have to do that 3-4 days before it expires) we catch the train to Beijing on the 16th.
I got to have a look at the 2 Sign Language dictionaries they have. One is a children’s one, with hand drawn colour pictures of what the sign represents, the other is a rather thick dictionary, with photo’s of the signs (so you would need another Mongolian/ English dictionary with it, in order to understand what the sign means. The first one is all Mongolian Sign, the 2nd is a book that was constructed by HH & hearing & it is a mixture of Sign Languages (Korean, Chinese, + 2 others). The only MSL (Mongolian SL) is the alphabet. I really enjoyed learning a bit of sign, I learnt a few things, like how to say; Thank you, My Name ….. , Hi How are you, Good, Camel, Marmot, Gobi Desert, Mongolian, Horse, Turtle etc etc etc. Actually starting to write it down I now realise just how much I learnt.
We were asked if we had seen the BIG Chinggis Khan (40m high) monument just outside the city & when they realised that we had not, we were offered a lift with one of the Mongolian Deaf guys there (sorry I forget everyone’s names). He was a taxi driver (everyone is here really, if you have a car, you take passengers and they pay you). It was T35,000 ($35) to go there & it’s about 60KM out of the city, so not bad really + he even bought us some water on the way. Our driver had been to Australia about 5 years ago, he went to Sydney for a Judo championship, he couldn’t remember a lot of Auslan, but we managed to converse in a combination of International SL, Auslan, MSL + ASL. It was so nice to be interpreting again too, I did it for Geoff & also for our driver/ guide. I had a couple of interesting experiences with interpreting for our driver. We watched a video about the monument when we were there that had (limited) English captions, but nothing in Mongolian, so Interpreted that for our driver (so it went from Mongolian to English to SL), then we went to a Museum (located underneath the statue) & we had a woman that worked there who spoke some English (she was Mongolian) & she guided us around & I interpreted for our guide/ driver in SL too (even voiced back). Wow, what an amazing day. So nice to be interpreting again too - it was just so amazing!!
It had to be one of the best days & so nice to be able to communicate so well too, which we haven’t really had very much of since we arrived here. I felt so comfortable (& so did Geoff) conversing in SL - it was awesome.
I have to say a BIG Thanks to John Uri for the refresher in some ASL signs, that came in handy. It was really cool that we could fall back on the ASL alphabet to converse in as well. Their English was amazing, I wish that my Mongolian was 1/2 as good.
Tomorrow (Thursday) is our last day in Mongolia. We have arranged to meet up with everyone again (2pm) & hopefully I will even get a MSL dictionary. Can’t wait….