Serving in Sign
Missionary kid ministers to deaf children

By Emily Peters

BENIN, West Africa – A few years ago, Kari Singerman headed into a Benin village to help some American doctors host a medical clinic.

The teenager has spent most of her life helping her missionary parents minister in to the voodoo worshippers in these mud-hut villages, so she pitched in her local language skills to translate for the doctors.

But those language skills didn't help her when one little boy staggered up to their make-shift clinic sobbing.

"He was about 10 years old and he was so sad, but we couldn't get him to tell us what was wrong," Kari said. Feeling helpless, she searched around for his dad.

The father explained his son is deaf and mute. He has never heard or spoken a single word in his whole life.

"That really hurt me," Kari said, noting the team never figured out the boy's ailment. "That's the day I decided this was really important to me."

A world of darkness

Kari began to ponder what life must be like for deaf children in Benin, which is rated one of the world's least-livable countries on the Human Development Index. She realized deaf children in such developing nations don't share the same privileges as their American peers.

"Their parents are poor villagers so they can't afford to send them to a special school in the city," she said.

Kari also discovered few families have time to cater to children with special needs since village living requires so much daily work to cultivate crops and cook meals. Deaf children might make simple signs to tell when they are hungry, but they can't communicate much more than that.

They can't tell anyone when their shoes become too small, when they need another blanket on cold nights or what hurts when they're sick.

Nor can they hear the story of Jesus Christ.

"This is an unreached people group," Kari attests. "This is another language to cover in all the tribes and tongues that need to hear the Gospel."

Passion to action

Kari wasn't sure what she could do to help as a teenager  - except gear herself up for future action. She enrolled in a class in American Sign Language.

Then, she met a local pastor's wife who shares her passion for those who can't hear, speak or communicate. During the week, she uses the one-room church where her husband preaches every Sunday to start a deaf school for village children.

Kari was ready to pitch in.

The school, in its first year, has four students who had never been to school before. Their ages range from 6 - 12, but they are all at the same educational level – level zero.

"These kids have never learned anything, and they come in so frustrated," said Kari, an expressive teen whose graceful fingers often involuntarily flutter in sign language. "But I just love these kids because they're so adorable. All of them are pretty bright. You can tell they love learning. When they realize that they are learning something, they get so excited."

Kari realized the children probably wouldn't be deaf if they had grown up in America. Antoine and Antoinette are twins whose ears were probably damaged while in the womb of their malnourished mother. Miphrane lost her hearing when she was two years old after suffering from a remarkably high fever, probably inflicted by meningitis treated too late.

But their deafness hasn't affected their ability to learn.

In a few months, the children have gone from not even knowing how to say hello to signing their names and figuring simple addition. With their tiny fingers, they can sign numbers and spell words like father, mother, brother and baby.

Kari, who helps at the school a few days a week, has developed games to help the students identify colors and words. She is also teaching them to read lips so they can learn to speak and understand others.

"These really are big steps," Kari said. "I'm excited to see what they can do after this first year of school."

Eventually, she hopes they will learn how to communicate with hearing people and learn a trade, like carpentry or tailoring.

"But the most important thing is that they can hear and share the Gospel," said Kari, knowing many of their parents worship voodoo idols. Kari hopes these students will eventually be responsible for planting deaf churches among their own people.

Someday, she hopes to start deaf ministries in foreign countries where the unhearing have few opportunities.

"Who knows, she said, "God may lead me back to Africa."

**Update: Kari recently finished her home school studies and is now studying American Sign Language in a college in the United States.