We arrived at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind in Spartanburg at two in the morning on Sunday. After approximately 20 hours of driving that involved a stop at the Mizzou campus and interactions with both friendly and crazy students, a visit to the St. Louis arch and dinner at a barbeque joint in Nashville, Tennessee, we made it to the campus unscathed but extremely tired. I fell asleep during the last leg of the trip through the mountains and woke up just as we arrived to see the beautiful lights that dotted the campus.
We spent most of our first day checking out the Spartanburg scene and then we decided to give ourselves a tour of the campus. I was amazed as to how big the campus was. There is a main hall in the middle of campus, surrounded by multiple schools for the deaf, a school for the blind, a school for the multi-disabled, various dorms for the students who stayed on campus during the week, and a field for horses used for therapy.
On our walk back to the Close Family House where we stayed during our trip, we started to see buses come in and we followed them to the high school boys’ dorm. I only know the alphabet in sign language. People say that I can get by with that, but I learned that it was very difficult to do so. Several members in our group have been taking sign language classes for a few semesters and another group member took three years of sign language in high school, so they were just really excited to be able to put their sign language skills to the test. The deaf boys were pretty shy since they were suddenly surrounded by us—a strange group of girls from Kansas. After introducing ourselves, we moved on to see the girls’ dorm.
We arrived at the girls’ dorm just in time for them to arrive back to campus. For the most part, the high school deaf girls were very friendly and were even willing to show off their rooms for us. Then we went to speak with the middle school deaf girls who lived downstairs. During all of our interactions, I was very nervous and worried that there would be a huge barrier since I do not know sign language, but they were very patient with me. Before long, I learned how to sign “what is your name?” and “nice to meet you.”
The middle school girls signed with us for a very long time. It was so much fun and they even gave us sign names! Now we can use our sign names instead of spelling out our names during conversations. I feel like immediately after someone mentioned Facebook, the middle school girls made a mad rush to grab pencils and paper to write down our names and to get our phone numbers. They were so excited to have us there with them and even begged us to help them with their homework.
Overall, my first full day at SCSDB was a very rewarding experience. I was definitely out of my comfort zone. To be exposed to kids who were physically disabled and deaf was intimidating at first but it got easier eventually. Complete with exploration of the city, the SCSDB campus, and a KU basketball win, it was definitely a great day. I only look forward to what my first day with the students in the classroom will be like.
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