Sparrow's Flight

I’ve been home for a week now, and a busy week it’s been, for sure! I tried to concentrate on getting rested up and ready for school. On Monday after my flight, I slept and rested all day and hung out with family. My family keeps mentioning how quiet it was while I was gone. ;-) They missed me a lot, and of course, I missed them, too.

On Tuesday I called up a friend I met a few months ago who will be a classmate this year to see if she wanted to work on fingerspelling with me. Breezy is really an answer to prayer. She lives about ten minutes from me (surprising, considering that our school is an hour drive away), she’s around my age, a Christian, and has free enough of a schedule that she’s been able to meet me at the last minute to practice signing quite often through the summer.

On Wednesday the language tutor managed to work me into his schedule. During much of the summer I would leave my tutoring sessions very discouraged because I was struggling so much. The last couple ones before I left for Australia were going much better, so I was hoping that I hadn’t lost too much during the month of little to no practice. My tutor actually said that it wasn’t obvious I hadn’t been practicing and commented on how much I’d improved since he started working with me.

On Thursdays whoever can from my class last year meets together for dinner and signing time. I’m impressed that we’ve been able to keep that up over the whole summer. It’s been really great for practice, and nice to keep in touch with friends, too.

Saturday I went to a Deaf Expo. That was awesome. Over two thousand people showed up throughout the day. There were 80 different booths offering various products or serviced of interest to the Deaf--everything from video relay services, to T-shirts with signing graphics, to free videos of the Gospels translated into ASL, to adoption agencies.

There was also a stage with productions going on all day. One of my teachers, Patrick Fischer, did some dramatic storytelling--he’s a professional actor as well as an ASL teacher. The performances were anything from the adoption agency explaining the details of adopting Deaf children, to fun things like Patrick and a magic show.

There were a ton of people there I knew from class, church, and other Deaf events. It was great just hanging out all day, browsing the booths, watching the performances, and chatting.

On Sunday my family went out to lunch together, and had a lovely time. Then in the evening we had a FaithWriters cyber party. We had 15 people chatting on instant messaging! How fun! Confusing for those not used to it, though. ;-)