Staff members at Campaign for Health Education, Sanitation and Hygiene practice sign language in Blantyre, Malawi, March 25, 2021. (Xinhua/Joseph Mizere)
Sign language is critical in spreading messages among people with impairments in Malawi where Campaign for Health Education, Sanitation and Hygiene is working hard to promote in the public.
BLANTYRE, Malawi, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Sam Kabango, 36, was born with hearing impairments, shares his experiences on challenges that he faces in efforts to access public information.
Sign languages are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning and these languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon, which is the only way that people with hearing impairments depend on to understand interpersonal information.
However, the lack of adequate human resources with basic understanding of sign language in Malawi is a problem.
Kabango lives with his family in the outskirts of Blantyre and it's hard for him to communicate with other people efficiently due to gaps in communication. In an interview with Xinhua, with help from his wife, he outlined some of the challenges that he encounters on a day-to-day encounters.
The photo shows a staff at Campaign for Health Education, Sanitation and Hygiene practicing sign language in Blantyre, Malawi, March. 25, 2021. (Xinhua/Joseph Mizere)
"Oftentimes, it becomes a challenge for me to access and understand information during public gatherings such as church and community meetings. This is so because a lot of people do not know the sign language. Making things worse, people try to communicate to me using signs, yet their gestures become complex and confusing in the process. I think there is a need for people to at least have a basic understanding of how sign language works," he said.
Meanwhile, Campaign for Health Education, Sanitation and Hygiene (CAHESH), a non-governmental organization that has been reaching out to people with various impairments has started training its staff in sign language.
According to MacDonald Kaluwa, Executive Director at CAHESH, sign language training is a critical tool to the organization because it will ease communication abilities which have been a problem in executing their programs among people with communication impairments especially the deaf.
"The sign language is a good initiative as it now means that as an organization, we can now effectively communicate and assist with services without problems. Apart from sign language, CAHESH develops public health education Braille books for people with visual impairments in order to aid them with access to health education," he said. ■
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