27. Sylvia

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Sylvia squeals with delight and leaps toward the camera. I’ve never seen anyone so excited to be interviewed. She looks so happy to see me, but maybe she’s just glad to be pulled off her work shift. I choose to believe the former but whichever it is, she is absolutely giddy with glee. While the interpreter is getting ready, Sylvia takes off, with me in hand, and gives me a tour of the facilities there at the DMI church in Makerere, Kampala. Each room, every plaque on a wall (usually dedicated to Neville) brings a fresh squeal and more infectious laughter. This is a firecracker with a whole lot of joy in her heart. 

We begin the interview and I ask her to tell me about Kampala. This question draws more cackles and squeals and excitable signing. “Kampala is a good place and very peaceful,” she tells me with a big smile. She lunges toward the camera, still giggling. Did you catch that? Kampala is a very good and peaceful place! “Yes,” I assure her. “I caught that and I’m glad it’s such a nice place. I look forward to visiting as soon as health conditions allow.” This suggestion is almost too much for her. She claps her hands and breaks into such raucous laughter she almost falls from her seat. “Kampala has good security,” she continues, beaming, and we thank God for Uganda.”

“Tell me about your childhood,” I ask her. At this, her whole countenance changes. Her face drops and she slumps in her seat. The peals of joy are replaced with the groans of one in agony. She was an orphan, she tells me. Her mother died when she was a baby and her father died when she was five. She was moved to her grandmother’s house and that’s when the real trauma began. “Every night was suffering and misery for me,” Sylvia tells me, on the verge of tears. Her face has completely changed. The glow has gone, a stony darkness has come. 

She was an alcoholic. “Every night she told me that I wasn’t her child. Every night she told me that she didn’t love me, that she couldn’t love me. She was always shouting and yelling at me. She deprived me of food. She was always beating me – every night hitting and beating and screaming and cursing at me.” Sylvia signs her words but it’s her groans that reveal the extent of her torment and I’m haunted by what I hear. Her moaning is so loud I can’t hear what the interpreter is saying. Other terrible things happened to her but I couldn’t hear what they were. I didn’t want to hear what they were. Sylvia would run away from her home at night until it was safe to go back but most nights it was never safe to go back, and the beatings would continue.

She found she had some relatives in Kampala, 270kms from her grandmother’s home, so she left to stay with them. They took her in and gave her a bed and some food but nothing more. “They had no love for me either,” Sylvia laments. “They just gave me some food and then told me I had to pay for it. But I was just a child, and a Deaf one at that! How could I pay? I had no-one in the world who cared for me, no-one who loved me. I felt so completely isolated.”

One day, when Sylvia was 9 years old, she met another Deaf girl who asked her if she’d ever been to school. Without being able to pay fees, that was never an option. But this girl told her that the Deaf school in Kampala, run by DMI, might be willing to support her, and when she met Rev. Bulime, the pastor at DMI’s Immanuel Church of the Deaf, he arranged for Sylvia to go to school for the first time. 

What was that like?

The Sylvia I had first met – all effervescence with big smiles and a bigger laughter – returned. “I was so happy. For the first time in my life, I felt accepted, excited. I felt loved!” She begins to squeal again and I can see why. Before attending the school, Sylvia’s life had been characterised by frustration, loneliness and fear. After starting at the school her life became one of relief, friendship and an uncommon zeal for life. These are the darkness-and-light, before-and-after stories which are so typical of the DMI student experience. This is what we, as supporters, long to see. This is the wonderful bang that we get for our buck: radically changed lives.

Sylvia’s life would change again in 2006. At the age of 13, through the work of the Immanuel Church of the Deaf and under the guidance of Rev. Bulime, Sylvia gave her life to Jesus and was baptised. This began a transformation in the way that Sylvia saw herself, her deafness, and the world around her. “I know who I am now,” she explains. “God made me just the way I am, He has His reasons for this and I’m so thankful for that.” Indeed, it is Sylvia’s deafness that has allowed her to gain an education, something her hearing sister could never be afforded.

Sylvia’s life has become one of selfless abandon. This is in no small way because, through pray and guidance, she has learned to forgive those who hurt her. The focus of her life now, she declares, is to help others. She serves in church. She works on staff. She leads the praise and worship. I can see how gifted she would be in this, leading the congregation with her unrestrainable joy, her gorgeous gestures and her trademark squeals.

What does the future hold for Sylvia? At 27, she has her whole life ahead of her – an educated life, a life of purpose and love. She would like to study more at the Bible school connected to the church. But whatever the future holds, she is unconcerned because, she tells me with the face of one who is truly content, “God has never let me down, and I know He never will”. Sylvia’s parting words carry the hope that one day God might make her an apostle to the Deaf so she can take the gospel to others wherever they may be.

If you would like to know how you can support Sylvia, any of the kids or teachers, or help meet any of DMI’s needs, please click on the donate button on the top right of the page, or mail to info@deafmin.org 

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