Above: The people taking part in the Deaf Guide Training Course in San Ramón today.
Today after a slightly late start we began the First ASL Deaf Guide Training Course, first of all we played games to get to know each other a little better and to try to see some of the differences between ASL and ISN. After we went through some of the basics of what a tour guide actually is. I asked the group questions about what a tour guide does, what is their job and responsibilities. I also asked them what we could potentially show deaf tourists in the Matagalpa area and in Nicaragua. After which we continued with a presentation of “What makes a good tour guide?” interpreted by Jes in ASL.
The next part of the day was to get some basic ASL under our belts and Geo taught us the ASL alphabet and numbers from 0 – 100. He also showed us how to sign years in ASL so that we are able to tell American deaf people the dates that buildings and monuments were constructed.
I took the lead on the following part of the day where, with Frank’s (the Nicaraguan interpreter) help, we taught the group how to use a Spanish – English dictionary so that they can finger spell words in English if they don’t know the sign. This will also help them when planning tourist routes for ASL users so that they know the word in English. Then at an internet café they can use online ASL dictionaries at websites such as ASLpro to look up the sign for the word.
The last part of the day we played ASL Pictionary, where I gave the participants a word in Spanish and they had to draw a picture to represent it. The rest of the class had to guess the word and look it up in their Spanish – English dictionaries to finger spell the word in English and in ASL.
The day has been quite an experience and I think that we are all very happy and have learnt a lot in one day. Geo, Jes and I are all extremely tired and there are still 5 days to go and more planning needs to be done tonight to adapt parts of the course after our first day. We got feedback from the class at the end of the day and it was all very positive, one thing that came up is that they had found ASL numbers quite difficult to get to grasps with (I can understand this as so did I!). So a minor alteration to the program has to be putting more ASL number work in tomorrow, so I’m going to sign off for now and go design an ASL bingo game…..
Geo has also added a few new entries about his experiences in Nicaragua to his VLog:
