Just Chatting

This past Friday evening was a little different for me. It was 'Guy's Garage Night' at our house where my husband and the men from our church gather at our home and work on some fun project in the garage.

This month's project was to begin building a scale model of our new church building that we hope to start construction on in the spring.

After a hearty supper of homemade chicken fricot (Acadian style chicken soup), homemade vegetable beef soup and fresh baked rolls, the men headed off to the garage and went to work.

My plans for the evening included a trip to a local Tim Hortons coffee shop where I knew some of my new-found deaf friends would be. They have been meeting every Friday night for fellowship and I had been invited to join them this week. What a great time we had. From the moment I arrived until it was time to say goodbye we were telling jokes, learning new signs and just plain getting to know one another. And this was only after I have studied nine of the 45 free online lessons.

Afterwards, I left for home with a smile on my face, glad to have had the opportunity to visit with some very special people.

(the manual alphabet)

Deaf statistics...
Across all age groups, in the United States, approximately 1,000,000 people over 5 years of age are "functionally deaf." About 8,000,000 people over 5 years of age are hard of hearing (that is, have some difficulty hearing normal conversation even with the use of a hearing aid). Canada has about 1/10 the amount of USA stats based on the fact that Canada has 1/10 the population of the US.