“Can you imagine? Having no one to talk to?” Laurie Lee asked.
Deafness is a difficult subject — an affliction that fewer than two or three children per 1,000 are born with, but which many more suffer from throughout their lives. Hearing loss, if not full deafness, often results in social isolation, particularly in smaller rural communities such as those found in the Verde Valley.
A new group is making headway in relieving that isolation, however. Three months ago, Lee and her husband Ed Lee banded together with Patricia and Laurent Lagueux to form the Signing Circle at Cottonwood Public Library. In part inspired by their experience with a similar group in their hometown of Prescott, they said that their success in Cottonwood is singular within Yavapai County.
“We just started and we’re doing great,” Lagueux said, adding that while a single person showed up to the first meeting, the number has swelled to 12 during the most recent one in January. Many of those who attend, Lagueux insisted, might otherwise have little social interaction. “The deaf in small towns don’t have a community … By having a group like this, they get to come and meet people.”
Though not deaf or suffering from impairing hearing loss — or any of the other factors that might require one to use sign language, such as Downs Syndrome or severe autism — the Lagueuxs have ample reasons to sympathize with the deaf and hearing impaired. Several years ago, a deaf couple moved into their neighborhood and began teaching the Lagueuxs to sign. Patricia Lagueux’s own grandmother was deaf, though Lagueux did not know this for much of her life.
“She was so ashamed she didn’t want anyone to know about it,” Lagueux said. “Many deaf people still don’t want people to know.”
Yet many deaf people don’t have the option to speak. One of the Signing Circle’s first contacts in the Verde Valley was a 27-year-old man who had lived for eight years without speaking to another person using sign language. According to Lee, the majority of families do not learn to sign, and thus their children end up in an age-old pattern of being marginalized even at home.
“We hear a lot of sad stories from them,” Patricia Lagueux said. “A lot of people think they’re dumb …. It’s very difficult for them to find a job.”
Laurie Lee nodded. “Many times, we find them working in hotels, making beds.”
The Signing Circle is not a sad place, though — as evidenced by the frequent and corny jokes Laurent Lee tries to tell in sign language. Many, he admitted with a chuckle, do not translate. American Sign Language, the most common sign language throughout the world, is not synonymous with English. It is a language all of its own, with dialect variations subject to culture and geography.
The Lees and the Lagueuxs have embraced the language, fully.
“We have some of our best arguments when we use sign language,” Laurie Lee said, grinning at her husband.
The Signing Circle now has legs, Patricia Lagueux added. Though centered in Prescott and Cottonwood, the couples do outreach throughout Yavapai County and beyond: They are actively trying to help deaf individuals in Navajo County, going as far as Indian Wells to make contact.
