Four weeks of classes into the semester. We have been BUSY. Our director/webkeeper was called away at the end of 2022 due to a death in her family so we apologize for not updating the website as is our custom. In the end, the deceased is believed to be eternally content in Jesus’ presence while those still remaining on the planet are working through steps to keep moving ahead.
Natalia knows none of this of course. She had her 6th birthday while we were on Winter Holidays and we celebrated with her when she returned to classes. From these photos, you can see Delilah (the dog) continues to tolerate hugs and Betsy continues to “teach”.
Our fleet of volunteers has kicked up their gears and bring us monthly lunches as well as come once a week to teach a variety of skills with the boys. Every young person should have the ability to make fried chicken, boil pasta and chop veggies. Who knows what the next lessons will be!? Natalia’s volunteer driver is Lucy – she joined us for birthday cake and games that day.
We are always excited to have Jerry and Christina from WyldLife YounLife join us! We are possibly the smallest group they ever have as far as numbers but we are always enthusiastic! SO THANKFUL to God to their willingness and the willing hands of our staff interpreter Amber.
Thank you each for your prayers as we continue to minister here at CSCD. Pray with us for these students and for those who will be coming in the next and future school years.
We have completed three weeks of classes and are happy to say that our students have been attending IN PERSON consistently!
This year, we have only THREE students – the two boys pictured above are 17 and 18 years old and attend full time (8 a.m. to 2 and 3:30 respectively) and our little girl comes Tuesday and Thursdays from 2:30 to 4:30 for ASL/language development instruction.
From these photos, you can see we are working to maintain safe distances while still being able to talk easily without masks. For our students, it is SO important that they SEE our facial expressions and read lips. While working with them, we are maintaining air flow and safe distance protocols, using clear face shields and desk shields are necessary. We are thankful for our outside spaces and the free flow of air through the classrooms plus an amazing supply of alcohol to spray the desks and floors and keep things as Covid-Free as possible.
We continue to have our Deaf Fellowship time on the Second Saturday of each month. (third photo above). Our next event is scheduled for Sept 11. Pray that our deaf friends will be able to come – many are aging and find it difficult to drive at night so we have changed our meeting time to afternoon. We are so glad that our friends in the area have been coming and we are glad to be able to sit and talk with them.
Thank you for praying for our students, our staff and our ministry here in Luquillo. Times are weird but God is FAITHFUL. Praise Him!
Our 2021 year began with offering a community ASL class. We are excited to have several families and mothers attending the class and look forward to God working through this to reach more with His love. Mizael appears above – as our model for the activities we are planning for the class. You can play the game here! (only through Feb 192021)
We have left our First Friday evening activity time in 2020 and moved to a Second Saturday activity for our Deaf Adult Fellowship. As our population ages, we have to accommodate. Night vision problems were inhibiting some attendees. So now, on the Second Saturday of each month at 1 p.m., we hope to gather in small numbers for indoor or outdoor games – horseshoes? frisbee? dominos in the pergola? Come join us for an afternoon of fellowship in safe numbers and a safe setting.
The pictures above are from NOVEMBER. What was happening that month that prevented us from updating you!?
Oh yea! we were preparing for a visiting work team from Arrowhead Bible Camp and then enjoying the team from Arrowhead Bible Camp. WORKERS they were! Our project was to paint and refresh our school chapel which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2020. While here the Arrowhead team did it ALL – finished the project, finished other projects, went to 3 different beaches, kayaked the biobay, had and early Thanksgiving dinner with the school kids, made Diego cry, zipped over Toro Verde in Orocovis, attended the Deaf church in Hato Rey, rode horses at Hacienda Carabali and enjoyed a private afternoon as Las Paylas. In a week.
If you cruise the site, you will see BEFORE photos of the chapel. here are the AFTER ones:
On the day the Arrowhead team left, our school principal received a phone call that Pam Eadie Mowbray had died. Pam was our principal from 1986 through 1996. Pam came to PR and began working at the school in January 1971. She culminated her teaching career here with us 2005(?). Betsy, our principal, has been helping Pam’s husband Alan with odds and ends to tasks. If anyone would like to send him a card or message: Alan Mowbray, Condo Playa Azul1, Apt 1304, Luquillo PR 00773
And now we are preparing for the end of this semester:
Friday, October 11, we were blessed to have only ONE student in attendance. That student took an interest in this millipede so millipedes became the focus of the day. Today is October 18 and we are blessed to have only TWO students in attendance. They were given the opportunity for FIX YOUR FOOD FRIDAY and learned (or helped) to make chili for today’s lunch.
Sometimes, having a small number of students is a blessing. We are able to spend time to chat about THEIR specific lives and needs and trials and joys. Often we have too many children and not enough hands to put into their learning. More and more students coming to us, as a special school, have multiple needs in addition to being Deaf. What a joy when we have one on one time and can share in their lives specifically, learn more about them and pray with them alone.
Pray with us for the special needs of the Deaf in Puerto Rico.
We are excited to have our regular Friday handbell rehearsals and the dedication of the adult Deaf persons who are participating in that. They have their work and their families and yet have this desire for music. One of them told me, “I work and I am stressed all week but I have THIS BELL TIME in my mind and look forward to this time all week.”
Praise God that through the ministry of handbells, this person’s emotional needs are being cared for.
Mizael has been diagnosed with a vestibular disorder that is associated with his deafness. Mizael has missed a great portion of the school year due to dizziness, nausea, medical appointments, motion sickness, and headaches.
With all of the analyses, the doctor suggests doing a cochlear implant so that his health will improve and his dizziness will lessen. Some of the medical costs and costs of therapy and recovery will not be covered by the insurance and we are praying for your cooperation to help us with this.
Needed: one (or more) 7(ish) year old hearing-impaired or Deaf children to accompany Diego on his educational journey.
His teacher is older than his grandmother and she needs some help in the PLAY department… The other students are older too and don’t exactly want to swing and play baseball during recess time. Pray with us for the next group of little ones to join in the learning fun.
Needed: one (or more) 2ish something hearing-impaired or Deaf children to accompany Natalie on her educational journey.
It’s just more fun to learn with a friend and have someone to talk with other than the older people around you.
We truly know that language is best learned in community. We have established an environment that is linguistically rich and visually accessible for our students. Pray with us for the little ones in the area – we hear of some in public schools where they are not linguistically stimulated, where they are developing delays in their linguistic development due to the non-accessibility of a visual stimulus accompanying their language experience. Deaf children learn by SEEing and DOing. Hearing children learn by hearing. English and Spanish are but auditory languages. They do not reach into the brains of a child who has a hearing loss of any significant levels.
And hearing aids don’t FIX things the same way glasses can fix things. My students all have hearing losses into the orange region of the audiogram at this LINK. They do not hear most of the speech sounds without extra help – that means raising my voice, using a hearing aid or other amplification. Most parents don’t take the time to look their hard-of-hearing/Deaf child in the face to have a conversation. So the child misses out on 82.9% (totally off the cuff estimation) of what is said. They are left wondering, guessing, trying to fill in the blanks.
On the other hand, most parents don’t raise a HAND to help their hearing-impaired child:
About 90%of the deaf population has two hearing parents and 88% of those parents do not know sign language. LINK HERE
And so I know there are children experiencing LANGUAGE DEPRIVATION simply because someone told their parents that having an interpreter is the answer. Suppose you don’t know ASL (American Sign Language) and you travel to China and you are given an ASL-Chinese interpreter. How much are you going to learn about China from watching the ASL interpreter?
Exactly what a child who doesn’t KNOW ASL faces when watching someone batting their hands around in first grade. The child MUST be in a place to learn the language so that they can then access the materials of learning. How does one learn a language? Come on, you know. You learned a language. You are reading this. YES! You learned by listening to your world from the time your ears developed (about week 16 of gestation inside your mom) you were learning the language of your world. But a child born deaf missed out on even that opportunity. Of course, some babies are born hearing and then lose the sense through trauma… but alas, without a language, they are left behind.
And so, would you pray for those children who are in this area, on this island? Because we have some lovely little ones here beginning to learn ASL and speaking and communicating in glorious ways… and my heart breaks every time I meet a small child who is SO isolated because the significant forces at work for the child haven’t grasped the idea that LANGUAGE development is IMPERATIVE to life experience and learning.
We started 2019 with prayer. God is at work in our area and we are SO excited to see HOW God will carry out His plan using us.
You can read this at https://cscdluquillo.com/with-these-hands/ – we have been praying for quite some time now for God to show us His plan for this facility and for the Deaf of this part of the island to be reached for Him.
“Continue to pray with us for workers to realize an adult Deaf ministry on our northeast corner of Puerto Rico with CSCD as the home base.
The SAME needs that the first workers discussed in 1957 and 1958 before opening the Evangelical Deaf Mission are still the needs of today:
the need for Bible teaching among the Deaf population (there are presently less than 10 Bible-teaching churches for the Deaf on the island),
the lack of literacy skills among the Deaf population (how can God’s Word speak if God’s Word is not accessible?)”
We look forward to classes resuming on January 14. We have two new volunteers on our list of workers- pray that they will be consistent workers and willing to adapt to the needs of the Deaf children they will be working with.
We are SO thankful for God’s faithfulness to this ministry as we enter our 60th year here. None of the present workers has even been alive for 60 years- we draw on the heritage of the ministry and thank God for His vision in the beginning and through the years until NOW. He continues to provide and we continue to be blessed by His provision.
God’s goodness never ceases to amaze me. I stand in AWE of our great God and His wonderful works. There is a link to a song there if you are interested in listening as you read.
As we organized the newsletter (late because May was just too busy and honestly, overwhelmed by the past school year, it was difficult to know what to write in a newsletter) God brought SO MANY amazing memories of His great provision and strength to our minds. It was hard to know what to include and then what would be left out… so we included very little other than praise for God and what He is doing here.
This past week, seeing our new little 6 year old begin to understand that LETTERS make WORDS and WRITTEN WORDS have meaning was another AWEinspiring moment. We are made in God’s likeness… what DOES that mean? Our ability to communicate on a level deeper than sniffs and barks? Our ability to use WORDS to express our thoughts? Our ability to love beyond words? Nonetheless, watching little Diego learning about WORDS has brought “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us” to my mind again and again.
In the Beginning was the Word…
In Diego’s beginning here, he has many words he can say. But when the words are written, they hold no meaning for him. He is slowly learning that the sounds of the words he is saying are paired with letters… and he got 100% on his 4 word spelling test on Thursday. WOOHOO!
Pray for Diego. He is in class part-time simply because with only 1 teacher, she can’t teach him and the high schoolers at the same time. And so he comes part time. While he is here, the high school duo are working semi-independently on reading and writing. They have a video vocabulary tutor twice each week. They have a math tutor who comes in as he is free to do this. Their other lessons are all in the after lunch times when Diego has gone home. As Diego learns to do some things on his own, the teacher will be able to do more with the high school students in the mornings. We will be able to do some group activities. But until Diego understands that the planet really revolves around the sun and not him, things will be more structured and less spontaneous!
Thank you for your prayers. Please keep an eye and a prayer on the Atlantic Satellite during hurricane season. If you see something developing, please ask God to spare the little islanders who still are living with blue tarp roofs and no electricity. While most of PR has electricity, Dominica for example is still repairing their infrastructure. And many roofs have been unrepaired here due to lack of supplies and slowness of FEMA and insurance companies.
Thanks again for stopping by, for reading, for praying.
Needed: one (or more) 2ish something hearing-impaired or Deaf children to accompany Natalie on her educational journey.
