Knowlege is power

My friends looked at me, as though to say, “ you do it. We don’t know how to deal with her. Your writing skills are better than ours as we don’t want to embarrass ourselves by writing in broken English that the hostess wont understand.”
So I made a sign to the hostess, my left palm mimicking the flatness of a piece of apaper and my right hand pantomiming holding a writing instrument. The hostess asked “ you want a piece of paper and something to write with?” I nodded in assent. After she rummaged around a bit in the drawers of the desk, she slid a piece of scrap paper and a pen to me.
I turned to my friends and signed to them “you want to know what they serve for breakfast, right?” and Earnest gestured “Yes, I want to know if they have any sort of egg dishes.”
I signed back “ok” and bent down over the piece of paper writing “what do you serve for breakfast?” The hostess read my message and handed me a bunch of menus stating verbally “you’ll find what you’re looking for on the menu.” And even though I could hear her because I had hearing aides in, it struck me funny that she would reply verbally instead of writing a response to what I said. It made me aware of her ignorance. She probably assumes like the majority of hearing people in the world, that all Deaf people read lips. In reality, this common assumption is as much true as assuming that all human beings speak English.

I passed out the menus and everyone unanimously decided to sit down at a table. It was then that I realized, “ hey, Yair can speak very well, why cant he interpret our orders to the waitress?” So, I asked him and he reluctantly agreed to do this for us. The waitress came with pen in hand, waiting for someone to speak. Finally through a few motions of pointing, she realized that Yair was going to speak for us.

At this point in time, I lost interest. I found the back of my book to be more engaging than watching the breakfast order being taken down. I twas while reading the book summary that I felt a hard nudge on my shoulder. I looked up.

“Soph, explain to Earnie what scrambled eggs are.” Yair commanded

I furrowed my brow. “He doesn’t know what scrambled eggs are?” I wondered. It seemed odd since he had them at least once a week at our school’s cafeteria. But I explained what they were anyway in motions describing how it was made.
“Oh, I see” Earnest signed, Understanding. Amanda, sitting next to him, nodded, expressing that she too understood.
So I assumed that earnest had ordered the scrambled eggs, but when it arrived I was surprised to see no scrambled eggs on his plate, evidently so was earnest because he was looking down at his plate in a very confused manner. I flagged the hostess down and wrote “ we ordered scrambled eggs, why is there meat on his plate instead?” The hostess looked at me and said “you ordered scrapple” and then rushed away to pour some coffee into a waiting customer’s mug. It was then that I realized that earnest had assumed the word scrapple meant scramble. And as my other friends received their dishes, similar scenarios occurred. They misunderstood what was on the menu, they misread it. And so I spent a good deal of the breakfast hour trying to reverse their mistakes and make sure they got what they wanted to eat.

Afterwards as I walked with them along the sands of the Maryland beach. I thought back to our breakfast. The fact that my friends had trouble ordering a simple meal in the hearing world troubled me. The fact that our deaf high school was graduating them troubled me. Something was clearly cockeyed in this picture. The irony in this picture was that people said our deaf school was the 2nd best in the country. If this was the second best, I didn’t even want to think about what type of education the other schools gave their students. The scene of deaf high schools reeked of discrimination in my mind. Just because they were deaf, they were given substandard education. African Americans are treated the same way. Knowledge is power, so the powerful keep the knowledge all to themselves.