Mishka Zena

My eyes filling with tears, I feel deep pain for Jack Barr while he shared his horrific experiences at the oral school he attended. Too many innocent deaf children have received brutal treatment at the hands of hearing educators and speech therapists trying to force them to speak and hear/lipread.  Children’s hands being tied, their mouths scrubbed [...]

I stood back, struck with amazement and sadness at the furor, hurt, and anger within the Deaf Community. Are we so different from each other that we truly cannot understand each other and come to full acceptance of everybody? First of all, I do not want to see anyone hurt, nor do I want anyone fired [...]

I’ve thought long and hard about this. I have encouraged DBC twice to become more transparent. I’ve asked two DBC leaders to vp with me, so we can discuss this further, but they both weren’t ‘available’. In e-mails, I asked them why they don’t want to acknowledge to the Deaf Community that they practice Deafhood [...]

In my last post DBC: Confusing Messages, I asked for clarification about the statements of a DBC representative quoted in the newspaper article as audism and cochlear implants weren’t mentioned in the mission statement of Deaf Bilingual Coalition: “The two groups will bring their competing agendas to Milwaukee in separate national conferences this week: one that [...]

Deaf Bilingual Coalition began as a humble group with John Egbert and a handful of Deaf Leaders last July to discuss about promotion of ASL. The idea was sparked by Amy Cohen Efron’s Greatest Irony where hearing babies are encouraged to learn sign language to communicate while their vocal cords are immature, but deaf babies [...]

Originally posted on August 7th, 2007   AGB In Bed with Cochlear Implant Companies AGB is a non-profit organization to which parents turn for ‘unbiased’ information and advice. How can it be unbiased if it’s sponsored by commercial corporations invested in making millions of dollars and so far hasn’t shown reliable data for its products?  [...]

Commentary: This is a post created last Feb when people accused the ASL vloggers of not being accessible to non-ASL users. I am reposting this as I feel some hearing and oral deaf people don’t fully understand the issues. Some of the ASL users have never achieved full linguistic competency in written English because they [...]

In my last post, I challenged AGBell Association regarding its letter of protest to Pepsi Cola Corporation for ‘implying that Deaf people only communicating using sign language.”  How does AGBell Association know the Deaf people don’t speak orally, too?  They may be wearing hearing aids and can lipread, too. I rest my case: Darren Therriault, the [...]

Many years ago while I was still a novice ASL signer, I became good friends with two ASL interpreters, both hearing. They taught me a lot about ASL. These two friends also took me to several ASL Interpreter workshops in the Deep South where I learned more about ASL and Deaf Culture. One of the interpreters, I’ll call [...]

How did you feel when the c.i. blogs started appearing in DeafRead?  What are your concerns? Hopes?  Comments: In my opinion, I think its good that CI blogs appear in DeafRead.   ############### Freedom of speech and we have to have both sides “pro” and “con”  I know it is hard but keep DeafRead in [...]