The World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), is the umbrella organisation under which all the National organisations of the Deaf worldwide fall, celebrates Deaf Awareness Month in September every year.
Each year WFD creates a theme around which national organisations map their activities. Deaf Federation of South Africa (DeafSA), asked the provincial organisations and service providers to organise their activities around the theme
“Access to information”
As a Department of SASL in this university, we play a major role in line with the theme. We do, however, not wait for the month of September to play our role. It is in what we teach our students on a daily basis. All our students will provide access to information in one way or another, especially the teaching students who, when posted to a school of the Deaf will provide access to the curriculum that contains the educational information.
Doctors, psychologists, social workers, nurses, etc. will provide services directly without recourse to an interpreter.
We therefore join the South African Deaf community (600 000) members in celebrating Awareness month and its theme this September, namely undertaking to better the life of the community through education, a prerequisite for all humanity.
The Deaf Community forms a very special “linguistic minority”. Other linguistic minorities can be subsumed in the linguistic majority and make it in life by being educated and accessing information but, because Deaf people have lost the ability to hear (losing one of the five senses), which can rarely be fixed, the hearing majority must join them by learning SASL.