FROM the FIELD

Alba’s world at birth was a silent one. She saw light but never heard her mother’s voice. She cried but never heard the crying. Healthy, growing, making sounds, no one suspected problems until the day her grandfather looked up from talking to her and insisted, “She doesn’t hear!”

“Of course, she hears”, they argued. “Why wouldn’t she hear? Nobody else in the family has a problem.” The grandfather’s doubt, once planted, grew. Her mother, Carmen Teodora Martinez, worried, “Could it be true? And if true, what would happen to her baby? How could she go to school? Find a job? Get married?” She carried the child to a doctor who confirmed that Alba was profoundly deaf and no, there were no medicines to make it right. There were, however, doctors in the city of Oaxaca who might help. Alba’s mother packed a bag and said goodby to neighbors. She was moving to the state capital to get help for her baby.

Hearing problems are far more common than the family suspected. It is estimated that of the 3,500,000 people living in the state of Oaxaca, 100,000 have hearing disabilities, 20,000 of whom are under the age of 18. The harsh facts are these: there are well established and effective treatment programs for children with hearing problems if such treatment begins early in the child’s life. If not detected and treated early, however, a child’s speech and hearing development will be seriously impaired. Without special help, these children may learn to “sign” but they will never hear or speak or read. For this reason, the American Academy of Pediatrics calls for “universal, newborn hearing screening” before a child is three months old and the initiation of treatment no later than the age of six months. But in Oaxaca there is no general and early testing of children’s hearing in either home, doctor’s office or hospital so Alba’s problem was not discovered until she was well over two years old.

In Oaxaca, Estela suggested a visit to CORAL, the Oaxaca Center for the Rehabilitation of Hearing and Speech, an organization formed in the late 1980’s by physicians and social workers from Oaxaca and the United States. Open to all children with limited financial resources, CORAL doctors tested Alba, fitted her with two new, high powered hearing aids and designed a long-term training program. Regular therapy sessions were scheduled for the child and her mother at CORAL and Silvia Estela followed up with information and supplemental training during regular visits to the child’s home. CORAL’s staff includes doctors, audiologists, therapists, and social workers. They do not teach “signing”. Powerful hearing aids are combined with the continuous stimulation of sounds to help children hear and speak. By the year 2003, CORAL had provided over 100 Oaxacan children with hearing aids as well as hearing and language rehabilitation therapy. Many of the children with whom CORAL has worked have been able to enroll and achieve in school. Alba Nidia has been one of the most successful of them.

When Alba reached the age of six, her mother and Silvia Estela decided she was ready for school. The school’s teachers, however, were not ready for Alba. When Carmen Teodora went to enroll her daughter, the teachers objected, said they couldn’t understand the child, said they had not been trained to deal with her problems, said they had more than enough trouble working with “normal” children so please take her someplace else. Once more, Estela intervened. She talked to the reluctant teachers, assured them that Alba had a deficit in hearing, not in intelligence, and that the child would be able to do the work because her mother and the workers at CORAL would be helping her. The teachers agreed to try and Alba became the first child with a hearing problem admitted to that school.

It wasn’t easy. Other children mocked the way she talked, pushed her around, tried to drive her off. Alba, a determined child, persisted. She made a few friends, put more words and sentences together, and began to read. Six years of hard work later she graduated from primary school with good grades, moved on through Junior High and studied computation for a year. Because she’s good at math, reads well and likes to type, employment working with computers is one of the future possibilities open to her. Today, however, she continues her academic work at a fine, private high school in Oaxaca, supported by the financial assistance of the Alexander Graham Bell Association, the technical services of CORAL, and the on-going training and encouragement provided by her mother and Silvia Estela.

Alba is now seventeen, an attractive and confident young woman who lives with her mother and younger brother in San Jacinto Amilpas. She and her mother welcomed me warmly when I, a stranger, arrived at her home in the good company of their friends, Silvia Estela and Peter Noll, CORAL’s Coordinator.

Sitting together on the patio, Alba described the hard adjustments of her early years in primary school. She recalled the frustration of hearing the sounds of people speaking but understanding little of what was said. She talked about the hours practicing with her mother, the attention of specialists at CORAL, the hearing aid that called attention to her difference, the continuing difficulty she has hearing when people talk too fast. And she remembered the satisfaction of making her first trip alone beyond the house, the enormous pleasure of learning, reading, and getting good grades, seeing the smiles of teachers gradually replacing frowns.

Alba’s success in school has been achieved because she’s learned to combine her aid-enhanced residual hearing with lip-reading and disciplined reading habits. Because there are no other hard-of-hearing students in her classes, the teachers are often unaware that they speak too rapidly. In these difficult situations, Alba uses all her skills to keep up. An imaginative and highly motivated student, she knows the road ahead will be long and arduous but she is now confident she has the tools and the support system enabling her to walk it.

For those who don’t know her well, Alba’s speech is not easy to understand. She communicates freely and fully with her mother and Silvia Estela, the two women with whom she’s talked all or most of her life. Communication with them succeeds because they know her well and because each pays close attention to her words, her lips and her eyes. This combination of long familiarity joined to intense care and concentration makes it possible for them to understand everything she says. Other children and teachers, however, will rarely be as able or as motivated to give so much time to Alba and communication with them will continue to be troubled and uncertain.

Given these realities, Alba’s academic success is striking evidence of her own quite remarkable intelligence and, at the same time, impressive testimony to the critical and continuous help provided over the years by her family, the teachers who have encouraged her, and the men and women of CORAL who have treated and cared for her.

Alba and her mother, Carmen Teodora Martinez

EDITOR’S NOTE: Beatriz Morales Cozier was born in 1948 in La Habana, Cuba. She completed her Master’s Degree at Columbia University and her Doctorate at CUNY with concentrated study in social anthropology. A descendant of the Abakua, the so-called “leopard people” who live in southern Nigeria and arrived in Cuba as slaves toward the middle of the 18th Century, and also of generations of female Santeria curanderas (healer/priestesses}, Beatriz has devoted the last twenty years to rescuing the Diasporic Afra-Mestiza culture from academic oblivion. On the coast of Oaxaca/Guerrero she found a route to her objective: the Dance of the Devils , which Morales compares with similar traditions across the African Diaspora. In the photo-essay that follows, Dr. Morales shares insights from her most recent visit.

My return this year to Cerro Las Tablas, Cuaji, Guerrero was marked, as always, by the Danza de los Diablos performed there for Day of the Dead, as in the other 45 fishing and farming Pueblos Negros of the Costa Chica. However, this time I was sought out by the women of the community.

In contrast to the men, who were concentrating on the ritual re-enactment of the warrior marroon tradition shared by the African and Indigenous peoples of the coast, the women’s talk turned on very different topics.

Listening in particular to the exchanges between a grandmother and granddaughter put me in touch with how simple, yet profound, was the work of maintaining cultural continuity.

For these Afra- Mestizas, the responsibility of the elders consists of protecting their children, guiding them in the ways of spiritual power, passing on healing practices and botanical knowledge to keep the community healthy, and preparing ritual offerings to the dead and food for the living.

They direct community rituals and maintain relationships of reciprocity between families and the ancestors to whom all are connected.

In this quiet process of intergenerational storytelling and information exchange one can notice many African retentions. To encourage fertility, for example, the natural world is conceived as a sacred temple, offerings are made to the river goddess (Ochun by name in W. Africa) where the women go to wash, and women wear yellow ( the sacred color of Yemaya) to increase power and signify pride.

Understanding these cultures means understanding the conditions of resistance that produced them. They demonstrate that we can continue to have a vital connection to this age-old energy in the present day, and with that active collective memory as a foundation, can decide how best to live with each other in the world.