Living in silence

Cambodia's deaf can receive informal education, skills training and support. But they still have a long way to go before being assimilated into society.

Eight years ago, Thoeung Sreytin’s daily routine involved cleaning her house, feeding the livestock and collecting chicken eggs for her grandmother in Kampot province, 150 kilometres south-west of the Cambodian capital.

She would occasionally meet her mother and three siblings in Phnom Penh, but telling her family how much she missed and loved them was impossible, because she had no way to communicate.

“I hated to be alone,” Thoeung Sreytin, who is now 32 and speaks sign language, says through an interpreter. “When people talked, I was left behind, alone. I could only see their gestures.”

“I really struggled, I only stayed at home. It was like living in jail. My mother did not take me anywhere,” she says.

This predicament is typical of Cambodia’s estimated 51,000 deaf citizens, who lack access to formal education and health services.

Their parents often assume they are afflicted with mental disabilities.

“They don’t really understand what it means to be deaf,” says Charles Dittmeier, director of the Deaf Development Project (DDP), which provides informal education, skills training and support to Cambodia’s deaf community.

“Society does not understand them or their problems. They are very much discriminated against. They are treated like an eight- or nine-year-old. It is very difficult to be deaf in Cambodia.”

Fewer than 2,000 deaf people in Cambodia, or around 4 per cent of the deaf population, are able to use sign language, Dittmeier says.

“The other 49,000 deaf people have never spoken to their own parents,” he says. “They have no written language, no sign language, they have nothing.”

In Cambodia, deaf people are referred to as “kor” in Khmer, or “mute,” because they cannot speak normally.

Dittmeier’s field workers have discovered that many families do not even give their deaf children names.

Thoeung Sreytin’s experience shows one way out of that anonymity. She studied sign language for two years in 2007, and later trained to be a sign language teacher herself.

Now, she teaches and works as a coordinator at DDP, and her life is moving toward a greater sense of normalcy. Socially, she is less isolated, and her options are increasing.

Progress on a national scale is slow, but moving in the right direction. In 2005, the government launched the country’s first news programme accompanied with sign language.

In 2011, sign language teachers were given formal government recognition.

Cambodia’s deaf community is working to establish the Cambodia Deaf Association, which hopes to bring deaf people together to advocate for more rights and acceptance.

Still, communication between the deaf and the rest of society remains limited.

“We have tried to invite the parents to learn sign language, but many said they don’t have time,” says Hang Kimchhorn, a director of Krour Sar Thmey, the other main organisation trying to help Cambodia’s deaf.

This means that after their training ends, deaf people returning to their family homes often experience similar feelings of social isolation, with a return to communication by writing and drawing.

“When they go back to the province, they are going to be very lonely again,” Dittmeier says.