To the land, again and again

Practically all the deaf of Adamorobe are farmers, in heart and soul. Every morning you see them, machete under their arm, a barrel of drinking water on their head and in their old clothes, leaving for their piece of land where they cultivate corn, cassava and yam. The land of the Adamorobe farmers is located on the surrounding hills, which makes the journey go uphill, often through low but dense jungle which has to be mastered with the humongous knife. They use a stick to pound on the ground to chase snakes and scorpions off the trail. Behind them, Adamorobe gets smaller and smaller, like the picture at the top of this blog.

At the edge of the village stands an old, tiny building. That building was a little school for the deaf in the seventies. It was closed after just a few months, however, following an escalated conflict between the students and their teacher. For the deaf, this school – in which hearing children now take classes – is a vivid reminder of their limitations today. “To the land, again and again, every single day”, is a complaint you here quite a lot here. It is also the most common job for the hearing, but there are also a few of them with food, sewing, carpentry shops etc. This leaves the deaf feeling limited because they haven’t learned a trade at school.

It’s partly because of that, they conceive themselves as better farmers than the hearing. An observation of Kwame, a deaf man of 60, is as follows: “The hearing are lazy… while the deaf are hard and strong labourers”. The roots of these convictions, however, are deeper than the link with the lack of schooling. In a text of 1973, written by a Ghanesian researcher, I found a story about the cause of deafness in Adamorobe. A deaf man was invited to marry one of the hearing women of the first people who settled into this valley. The presumption was that deaf people are stronger and work harder and their goal was therefore to have as many deaf as possible on the land.

This is merely one of the various stories which explains the origin of the deafness in Adamorobe. It’s in accordance with what a hearing person here told me: it is assumed that the deaf are involved more seriously with what they do. Moreover, he mentioned that it’s believed that the ancestors trained the deaf as farmers.

All’s well that ends well, but farming only provides you with a very small amount of money. This brings forward the complaints about the failure of the education. Throughout the years there have been several attempts to offer the deaf more opportunities. A number of the deaf were brought to the city for longer amounts of time, to learn to carpenter or sew or work as a baker. They didn’t last long because of different reasons. More recently, an American mission donated a corn mill, a developmental project aimed at deaf which was not successful until then. The deal here is, that I – in exchange for their cooperation in my research – support them in setting up little businesses like selling fish, spraying weeds or baking bread; next to their farming, that is.

So this is what I’m going to try, and I collected a budget in Europe of which I will be using a part for this goal. If it will work, is another thing. Are their complaints a way of complaining about, situating and/or processing their situation in life; or are they real aspirations? After a lot of observations and conversations, it appears to me that it’s a bit of both. But one thing’s for sure: farming is in their blood.