by Pablo Martos, Certified Signing Time Academy Instructor

Somehow, I convinced a remarkable young woman to marry me nine years ago, and she went around being remarkable until someone invited her to go to Ghana. I tagged along.

It started when a friend gave us some DVDs featuring an overly chipper woman in orange to help us communicate with our developmentally delayed son. Since then, my wife has started training to be an ASL interpreter, and has worked for Rachel in a number of capacities. I tended to be involved in some of the larger projects she did for the Signing Time Foundation, and as such, we both got to join Rachel, Leah, and a small group of other wonderful people whose names you won’t likely recognize, on a trip to support the Demonstration School for the Deaf in Mampong, Ghana.

It is really difficult to put into words exactly how the trip affected me, or how I feel we made a difference there. It was an unfortunately brief visit, so everything jumbled and blurred together in a busy whirlwind of activity. It certainly put my own affluence and happiness in perspective. As Ronai said, the people there are surprisingly happy for the level of poverty in which they live. I’d seen that kind of poverty before in Mexico, but I hadn’t immersed in it for a week, and this seemed qualitatively different somehow. If you look at this picture of a table from a college sociology textbook, you’ll see that the populace of Ghana is somehow happier than we are here in the US (or at least, that was the case in the late ’90′s, and I don’t know that we’ve gotten any happier here since the tech bubble burst).

But this trip also showed me how very important it is to have made the social equality advances we have. There are still places where the Deaf cannot serve on a jury here in the US, but they have opportunities here that they don’t have in most of the world. Here, there are Deaf doctors, lawyers, and teachers, and the ADA rules mean they can get an interpreter in most situations where they need one. The contrast with Ghana was immense. The DemoDeaf school is a haven in Ghana for children who are often otherwise forgotten or ignored. There, they get training, they get education, they get food and clothing, language and a peer group. But outside of the school, their world is very different. The school is run by a wonderful woman who happens to be one of some two dozen interpreters in the whole country, but until recently even that school was run by someone who didn’t use sign language. As you can see in this video, the general public is completely unaware of how Deafness works, or even what sign language is.

The gentleman in this video is a tour guide at a national park in Ghana, presumably someone who meets and talks with a very large number of people on a daily basis, and he had never met a Deaf person or seen sign language, much less seen a Deaf person interacting as an equal.

I hope we changed that tour guide’s perspective a little. I know we helped a lot of kids at the school immensely. We mostly worked with the younger age groups while there, and I helped Rachel teach a class that showed the children that signed words, fingerspelled words, and written words were all equivalent, and all could represent real things they could see and touch. I helped a new arrival at the school write his first few words at probably 10 or 11 years of age. We showed them that Leah was our and their equal. It was a very powerful experience.

I’ve been supporting the Signing Time Foundation’s work for about two years now in one way or another, and I have never been more convinced of the importance and value of what they do than I was on this trip. While we were there, we got to meet the very first Ghanaian to graduate from a two-year college. He was only able to make it that far, is only able to dream higher still, because of the help of groups like ours, because of people like you. That’s what the donation link at the bottom is about. Use it.

You can read a more detailed description of our trip, from my wife’s perspective, here.

Pablo Martos is an ASL student, a Baby Signing Time Instructor, and the father of two signing children with special needs.  He’s also the husband of Carissa, Master Signing Time Instructor and the Signing Time Foundation’s Academy Outreach Coordinator.

Why am I going to Ghana?

Pablo and his family with Rachel. Can you spot Carissa?

I’m a stay at home dad, and just started a grad school program. What am I doing going to Ghana? Well, the story goes back a couple years. You see, my wife is the infamously indefatigable Carissa Martos, and we have two kids who are . . . different. When we discovered that one of them needed sign language to jump-start his communication, she immediately started taking ASL classes, and signed up as soon as she could to use those skills in the Signing Time Academy and help others. Before long, she was an Associate Director in the Academy, and started supporting the Signing Time Foundation by throwing and coordinating fundraising concerts that sent Rachel all over the country.

At one point, I was at a park with my son, signing about the playground equipment (RUN, STOP, SWING, GOOD BOY).  A man in his late 40s, early 50s was watching us, and he started to cry.  Eventually he came over to my wife and I, told her he was Deaf, and asked if Julian was Deaf.  When my wife told him that Julian just couldn’t talk, but could hear, the man started crying even harder.  He told my wife that it was a beautiful thing watching a father sign with their child, and that he wished he’d been able to do that.  His father had never learned to sign at all, and so had died without ever having a conversation with his son.  That really impacted me, and I knew I’d need to increase my study of the language.  I started taking community college classes, making Deaf friends, and building a larger vocabulary with my son, eventually singing up with the Academy to be able to substitute in classes here or there.

I helped my wife every bit I could with her home business, and with the Rachel concert preparations. When concerts have taken place here in Portland or in Seattle, we’ve managed the whole affair ourselves, and in the rest of the country, my wife fulfills her role admirably getting others to do the same. There have been over a dozen concerts since we got started, and three of them have been our own. Two in Seattle, and one in Portland (with another planned for this coming Spring). Our first concert was in Seattle, and we filled our 700-person venue. Every single pre-sold ticket order was emailed in. I recorded, tracked, printed, and mailed every one, and tracked the funds as well. I made phone calls, I posted to Facebook and Twitter, I solicited items for a silent auction, and I pursued sponsors. I repeated the process for the two subsequent concerts, and each has been a success. At the shows I work backstage, I take tickets, I shake hands, I promote the Foundation and its other concerts and work, I sell popcorn and DVDs, I help every way I can, and I fall down from exhaustion at then end in a very satisfied heap, knowing it worked well and that it was in no small part because of my efforts. I do it for my wife, and I do it for my son, and I do it for all the people STF helps.

Well, because of our dedication to their work, my wife and I got invited to join the Signing Time Foundation on their trip to Ghana this January. The fact is, there is no way I could say no. Not just because my wife would’ve lost her mind, but because the need in Ghana is so great. The Signing Time Foundation does great work here in the US, important and fulfilling work that helps a lot of children. But Deaf children in Ghana have it so much harder, have so few opportunities and so many obstacles. It is impossible to care about the struggles of children with communication disabilities here in the US without caring about the struggles of similar children in Ghana.

If I can play even just a small part in helping the Foundation and Signs of Hope International make the world better for a few students, I have to.

Donate directly to Pablo’s Ghana fund:

Donors who contribute $50 or more will receive a limited edition pin!

Ronai Brumett has been invited to go with the Signing Time Foundation to Ghana in January of 2012,  in partnership with Signs of Hope International to help provide tuition and supplies for students who cannot afford to attend a School for the Deaf.

My name is Ronai Brumett. I am a Signing Time Academy Master instructor in Maple Grove, MN. I am also a sign language interpreter, I’ve been married to my sweetheart for 17 years, and together we have 4 amazing kids. My daughter Elizabeth (Ellie, pictured here with me) is 14 and fluent in American Sign Language. She and I will be joining the Signing Time Foundation team as they go back to Ghana in January, 2012.

I remember reading Rachel’s blog in 2008 and wanting so badly to be there. I sat down today to re-read that blog and I have to tell you, I started to get scared. I thought “What have I gotten myself into?” worse than that, “What have I gotten my 14 year old daughter into?” Then I got to the last few blog entries and I remembered why I really want to go to Ghana. I felt that excitement, the butterflies in my stomach, the lump in my throat and the tears in my eyes as I thought about being there, really making a difference in someone’s life.

I love to teach, I love ASL and I’m really excited about the possibilities that lie ahead with this trip. I saw one of the commercials today that show the starving kids and Africa and I thought about how sad that is. Then it struck me that the deaf children are not only physically hungry but they are mentally starved. They are longing for communication, knowledge and the chance to prove that they are not worthless. Reading Rachel’s blog about the teachers thinking it was useless to sign to the little kids because they didn’t know the signs, nearly broke my heart. I want to help make a difference, to see the look of understanding that happens when a concept in conveyed in a way that they finally “get it”.

I also want this for me, I know that may sound selfish, but I’m trying to be honest here. I feel that maybe I’ve just been cycling (Rachel’s blog day 10) that I just keep doing what I’m doing because I didn’t die in the night. I want my life to have meaning, I want to teach that to my children. I want them to grow to be the kind of people that want to make a difference also. And so I’m done waiting for that change to miraculously happen, it’s time to make it happen.

To pay for this trip, I have started going through all of our extra stuff and selling it on eBay. Ellie and I have been making homemade cards and treats, selling them different places to earn our way. I have set up classes and all of my class fees and the profit from selling Signing Time products has been put aside for our trip. My husband designed the “limited Edition Signing Time Pewter Pins” to help offset some of the cost, and I have asked friends and family and pretty much anyone who would listen to donate so that we can go and do some good. It’s a very difficult time of year to ask people to donate and of the $7600 that we need cover our expenses, we have been able to come up with about $3000. That is OK as I will continue to make stuff, teach classes and share with people the great opportunity they have to donate and make a difference also, until the debt is paid.

If you would like to help out, you can make a tax-deductible donation: 

Or buy the Limited Edition Hopkins Pin:

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