Volume 5, Issue 1
September 2011 www.discoveringdeafworlds.org
Humble Hearts:
The Story of a Bilingual Kenyan School for the Deaf Demolished and Rebuilt
Primary school Deaf students attend class at Humble Hearts School.
By Beatrice Anunda Humble Hearts School started in 2003 with the objective of reaching out to Deaf children who did not have the opportunity to go to school. Many of these children were denied the right to love and education due to either poverty or local cultural beliefs that deafness was a curse and an embarrassment. In 2004, we realized that a place to house these children was a necessity. Many Deaf children attending the school lived far away and constantly missed school due to a lack of money for commuter buses. The older students would at least walk the long stretches to school, but the littlest ones would be left home hoping that their parents or guardians would bring them to school. This rarely happened. The challenge of transportation led to some dropping out of school. Most parents from poor families cannot afford to employ someone to take care of their children when they go out to search for jobs. As a result, children are left outside, locked inside their homes, or left under the eye of a neighbor who at times ends up sexually abusing or subjecting them to child labor.
A brightly painted sign adorns the entrance to Humble Hearts School in Kenya.
It was a relief when a small room was created behind my parents’ home to house the first three Deaf students. The need for space grew each day and before long, there were 40 children. By 2005, we realized that there was a communication barrier between Deaf children and their hearing siblings as well as the community at large. We decided to open the school to these siblings. This decision influenced the community’s members, who had previously distanced themselves from what they called “that school for the deaf,” to embrace the concept of giving Deaf children a voice through education. Sign language classes were quickly introduced for both parents and the community. Before long, hearing children wanted to come to Humble Hearts. By the end of 2006, enrollment increased to 300 students, with more than 150 hearing children turned away due to a lack of space. Having Deaf staff was another way of boosting Deaf students’ morale and erasing negative cultural beliefs about deafness. Humble Hearts strongly believes that “disability is not inability.” We have seen children at Humble Hearts advance both morally and socially, September 2011 1