Deaf Students
June, 2003
| About 1% of every population is profoundly deaf. In Cambodia, that translates to at least 250,000 completely deaf people and people with enough hearing loss that they need sign language and similar assistance. Of that quarter of a million people needing assistance, about 800 are students in the Deaf Development Program and in the Krousar Thmey deaf schools. These students at the DDP classroom in Svay Rieng are some of the lucky ones. |
 Ordinarily the DDP program does not accept deaf students below 15 years of age because our program is non-formal education and only two years, and we would prefer the young students to attend a full, formal deaf school run by Krousar Thmey, a French NGO which accepts students below 15. |
 In the provinces, students are not close enough to the Krousar Thmey schools, so we accept students of all ages. This class has mainly older teenagers and young adults, but also a few children under 15. One girl is 10 years old. None would be in school without the DDP classroom. |
 The teachers try to make the deaf classrooms like hearing classrooms to make the deaf students feel equal. That is both good and bad, because the teachers, who do not have much training, introduce bad habits they themselves learned in hearing classrooms. |
 The school day for the deaf students ends at 4:00 PM (for the hearing students it's 5:00 PM) because some must travel a great distance to get home. Here Charlie talks to some of the students at the end of the school day. |