When hearing isn’t needed to hear the words of love

It is the last day before summer holidays and the students of Deaf Reach School are busy in building a nursery for children.
When the school will reopen in August, the staff of Deaf Reach, many of whom have met and married each other while studying or teaching, will no longer have to leave their children at home.
This way, three-year-old Inaya would not have to stay with her grandparents. Her parents, Nadeem and Zohra, both work as teachers at the Deaf Reach School, the place where they came to study several years ago but ended up meeting and making the best of the other half of their unheard lives.
The elder of two deaf sons, Nadeem, had started weighing his options about supporting his family after his father died.
He was lucky to have been studying at the Deaf Reach because it gave him an edge of being able to compete with others in the professional world in terms of both academic and professional knowledge.
For years, he did odd jobs to support his family while he also kept applying for a few blue-collar options.
Fond of computers and programming, Nadeem had absolutely no problem typing up his qualifications and achievements and braving numerous job interviews.
“I can’t even begin to count the number of places I went to apply for a job,” he said while sharing his life’s story with The News with the help of a colleague as a translator.
But as they say, courage seldom gets anyone somewhere when it comes to the professional world.
In the meantime, Nadeem had graduated from Deaf Reach. As luck would have it, the school offered him a place in its teaching faculty.
As he gladly settled down in his alma mater as a teacher to children like him who are unable to hear, he set eyes on the other half of his life, Zohra.
Belonging to a family where girls did not even leave their homes to study, Zohra was lucky to have made it to Deaf Reach as a college student.
Before Deaf Reach, she had been studying in Dar-ul-Sukun and when her time there came to an end, an extremely meek Zohra was thrown into the domesticities of life where her parents’ anxiousness about her future drove her nearly insane from worry.
“I used to ask everyone I know to pray for me, my future. My parents worried how I would be able to get married and their worrying made me anxious,” she said.
A close friend persuaded her parents to let Zohra continue her studies and this is how she made it to the Deaf Reach as a college student.
But her time here soon came to end too she was thrown back into the chaos of life back home. Her parents tried to shelter her as best they could, but it was not what Zohra needed.
In the meantime, with no way to approach Zohra’s parents on his own, Nadeem told Richard Geary, the founder of Deaf Reach School, about his intentions of marrying Zohra and sought his help.
Since the school makes it a point to involve parents in the lives of their deaf children, teaching them tricks and tips to assimilate and communicate with their children better, it was not difficult for Geary to reach out to Zohra’s father.
However, he was refused.
Zohra’s father drew the line at marrying his daughter outside the community, let alone to someone whom she knew socially from school and on top of that who also encouraged her to work.
It just was not going to happen, he ruled.
Father to a deaf daughter himself, Geary knew well the challenges and the difficulties of life of someone for whom it was difficult to even communicate with loved ones.
He let the dust settle, before approaching Zohra’s father again. He vouched for Nadeem, his character and his family, and he tried his best to explain to Zohra’s father that he would actually be marrying his daughter inside the community she was intimately familiar with, that of the deaf.
He explained to him that only someone like Nadeem could best understand her and provide her with the support she needed.
Moreover, Geary explained that Zohra needed to work. She needed a purpose in her life where she could utilise her energies, learn about her weaknesses and use her strengths.
Zohra’s father finally relented and gave his blessings to the couple. But what if their children are also deaf?
“There is no way you can guarantee that,” said Geary. “Like there is no way you know a child will not be born without an abnormality or you are not going to get hit by a car. Deafness is not a predictable condition.”
A couple of years later, Zohra gave birth to a completely healthy baby girl - much to the happiness of her father, but most of all, herself and Nadeem.
“In the initial days, one of us stayed up in case Inaya cried in the night or we slept close together that when she shook her arms, it woke us up,” said Zohra, sharing a few challenges of being a deaf mother. But there were not many, because a mother’s intuition is the best guide after all.
As Inaya has grown, in the company of her healthy grandparents, she has learnt to speak. With her parents, she has grown seamlessly into using the sign language used at home.
In fact, close friends say that Inaya is quite a chatterbox.
If Nadeem and Zohra had not come to study at the Deaf Reach, they would have never met and had a three-year-old joy, Inaya. Sometimes it takes more than just fate to bring lives together and make them show what they are capable of. By creating a support system for the members of deaf community and also those related to them, the Deaf Reach is able to do just that.