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From:
"Karlin, Ben" Date: Fri May 15, 1998 12:53 am Subject: Introduction | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Even though we have been running into each other all over the internet for years, I was thrilled to see who is on this list. Would love a few words of introduction from each of you, so I'll offer mine. I was born and raised in Chicago, began learning to sign there from Deaf folks (most graduated from Bell School in Chicago but plenty were from schools in the south and moved to Chicago during the 40s). My brother is deaf, having slowly lost his hearing after being hard of hearing all his life, but he does not sign at all. He is mentally retarded and lives in a group home in the Chicago suburbs. The local Deaf Club invites him to social and athletic events and he sometimes goes. I am so grateful that the community reaches out to include him. I worked as an interpreter at Triton Community College and the University of Illinois-Chicago for the last I-don't-know-how-many years. I am married and have two teenagers, all of us sign (ASL only, we learned from hanging out with Deaf). We went to a Deaf church in Chicago -- the Sign Language congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. About a year ago we moved to St Louis to join the little Deaf group here mainstreamed with a hearing congregation. I took a job with the Dept of Mental Health as an interpreter and my wife works as a labor/delivery nurse. Because I sometimes need to give lectures in sign, I started looking for a way to write notes for myself. That led me to looking at SignWriting and now, in my work, I am trying to figure out ways to help mentally ill Deaf signers learn and use SW to improve their lives. It should enable them to write notes for their own use without struggling to write and read English. Some of them need help with enlarging their sign vocabularies and I think SW can help them do this, also. That's who I am... How about you? Longing to know who each of you are, Ben Karlin Staff Interpreter for the Deaf, St Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center H007B, 5300 W Arsenal St, St Louis, MO 63139-1494 314 644-8270 V/TTY 314 644-8115 FAX | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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