Deaf hands

Deaf hands

by | Jan 20, 2025 | Deaf community, People with disabilities

Nompilo Lupupa is the sewing project’s manager. “We started the project in February 2020 because we could see that many deaf women were staying at home with nothing to do,” she said. “We wanted to start a project that could help them earn some income for themselves and for their families.”

“The parish had donated a lot of old denim jeans and we started making bags for women from these denim jeans.” Deaf Hands was the name chosen for the sewing project. “It is with our hands that we Deaf people communicate with one another but it is also with our hands that we display our creative skills and talents,” Nompilo explained.

“We are making embroidered bags, place mats, aprons for the kitchen, shirts and dresses, cushion covers, centre pieces and table clothes.”

“The big challenge during the pandemic was finding people to buy the items we make,” Nompilo said, “thankfully the diocese has opened a Catholic shop in Manzini called Good Sam. Some of our goods and wares are displayed and sold from the shop.”

“It is our hope,” she continued, “to increase our income so that we can realise the dream to include more Deaf women in the project. We would also be able to expand into knitting school jerseys for school children, hairdressing and nail care too. The more that Deaf women can benefit, the better.”

Sign language classes

Sign language classes

by | Jan 13, 2025 | Deaf community, People with disabilities

September is the month dedicated to Deaf Awareness across the globe. It is important time to conscientize the hearing community about Deaf culture, sign language and developing better relations between hearing and the deaf in family life. Sibusiso Zulu and Nqobile Mkhonta, both Deaf, have been teaching sign language to hearing parishioners who are interested in communicating with Deaf people. This project will resume in February 2025.

This programme was first started before Covid, Before Covid, the first classes ran for six weeks from October to November 2019. The Deaf community in the Cathedral parish started teaching regular Eswatini Sign Language (ESL) classes on Friday and Saturday afternoons. There was an enthusiastic response and over 60 hearing parishioners signed up for the classes. The classes resumed at the beginning of Lent in March 2020 but they had to suspended due to the rapid spread of Covid.

The enormous interest in sign language from the hearing parishioners had a huge impact on the Deaf community. They felt less isolated and more at home in parish when they saw hearing people make the effort to learn sign language. This built a wonderful bond of trust and friendship between the two communities.

God’s providential care has assisted us in getting this far through the various organisations that have assisted us. It is the prayer of the Catholic Deaf community that this assistance will continue so that all Deaf people and the disabled in Eswatini can be empowered and assume their rightful place within the church and society.

Fr Mark James OP

Reaching out to deaf people

Reaching out to deaf people

by | Jan 3, 2025 | Deaf community, People with disabilities

In 2013, Pope Francis penned his encyclical Evangeli Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) in and called the church to a pastoral conversion by becoming an evangelising church, a missionary church which responds to Jesus’ instructions to his disciples to “Go and make disciples”. Francis wrote: “We are asked to obey his call to go forth from our comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel” (EG 20).

One of these peripheries is the Deaf community. In his most recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti (We are all brothers and sisters), Pope Francis demonstrates how we are to “rebuild our wounded world by imitating the Good Samaritan” (FT 67). “We cannot be indifferent to suffering and we cannot allow anyone to go through life as an outcast” (FT 68). People with disabilities, in particular, “feel that they exist without belonging and without participating. Our concern should be not only to care for them but to ensure their ‘active participation’ in the civil and ecclesial community” (FT 98).

While spiritual and pastoral care for the Deaf community remains an important outreach, many Deaf people are unemployed and poor. It was decided by the Catholic Deaf community to start a sewing project for Deaf women.

Fr Mark James OP