A Hidden Unreached People in My Neighborhood

This past weekend, I learned about an unreached people group that could be--and probably is--living in my neighborhood.

John and I attended a President's Council meeting put on by an agency we support, The Seed Company. The Seed Company is an offshoot of Wycliffe that trains nationals in Bible translation. They bring in advisors to oversee and support the work and produce the Bible in about a third of the time a Western translator needs (since a national doesn't need to learn the language or the culture, but can begin work quickly).

One of the speakers at our conference, a representative from DOOR (Deaf Opportunity OutReach) International highlighted the deaf community--and especially the core deaf (i.e., congenitally deaf of those who became deaf very early in life) population--worldwide. Since most core deaf people can't read (they lack even the basic understanding of what such symbols might mean), the Seed Company recently decided it needs to produce signed versions of the Bible ("printed" on DVDs!) for the 40 to 50 million congenitally deaf people in the world today--deaf people who use somewhere between 200 to 400 different sign languages to communicate among themselves worldwide.

Something that about broke my heart: Our speaker told the story of a deaf man he knew who said, "When I went to school, my father patted me on the head and said, 'Good boy.'

"When I went to high school, he patted me on the head again: 'Good boy.'

"When I went to college: 'Good boy.'

"When I got married: 'Good boy.'

"And today, with children of my own, I have no idea what my father really thinks, what he believes, what his values are. All I know is he thinks I'm a 'good boy' . . . whatever that means."

The speaker mentioned that in 90% of families in the United States with a deaf child, neither parent learns to sign. In other words, the parents never learn to communicate anything of real importance--no values, no spiritual truths, no family history--to their deaf children. And if you think that statistic is bad, you need to know that the percentage of parents who never learn to communicate with their deaf children is even higher in India and Africa--something approaching 97%, according to our speaker. As a result, deaf people are ostracized outcasts even within their own families.

Besides being ostracized in their own families, they are also ostracized in the church.

Oh, yes, people reach out to the deaf. Many churches include signing ministries . . . often "transliterating" the grammar and sentence structure of spoken language rather than the unique structure of deaf (sign) language.

To learn more about this--what DOOR calls a cultural group--check out their page about Deaf Culture.

And to learn more about the translation project--which, we were told, would require specially signed versions of about 130 stories--check out Translation.

I pray these new DVDs (still years away from production) will change the lives of millions of deaf people.