PEN International- Day 4

We started this morning’s workshop- Setting Goals and Achieving Them with Scot Atkins and Pat DeCaro. We wrote down our goals, how to achieve them, resources we can use to help us to achieve them, and the deadline for achieving the goals. For me, I wrote down to become a better Deaf Role Model for Children or Deaf adults. I have to work with other people and learn from them; take some courses/ workshops I might need, get involved with activities, like camp, board member of organization/events, and research about expectations of a role model. There is no deadline for this goal, this goal for me will last lifetime. The resources for this goal are: time, effort and enthusiasm, my Deaf and Hard of Hearing advisor, people, researches, blogs, movies, books, etc.

The afternoon’s workshop was Role Modeling and Volunteerism. This was very timely for me. It help me to connect with the content from the morning workshop. We did a human tracing, which means a person lay on a large piece of paper and trace around that person. We put definitions of Role Model which would matches or parallel body parts, for example, heart=kindness, caring, loving. Over the time spent on this exercise we learned that our own individual role models changes as we meet new people and they help us to become more involved, give us feedbacks, etc.

Volunteering was the second part of this workshop. The whole point of this section was to see how beneficial volunteering can be for us. What will happen to us if we volunteer? Feel good about ourselves and others, work experiences, learn, produce, and many more. Also the impact you make by volunteering can be HUGE!

The last workshop for the day is Deaf Culture at Home. We studied about our culture but also the culture of Russia, Japan, and China. We compared and contrasted our behaviors, misunderstandings, communication skills, employment opportunities to name a few. Two very important concepts covered were Responsibility and Respect of others, regarding their background. We could see that this was key in making this workshop successful. Most of the misunderstandings we had were similar to what the people form other countries had experienced as well. For example, if you get lost and need help finding directions to your destination you usually ask a hearing person and that person keeps pointing and talking away from your face, losing eye contact. It makes it difficult to communicate if a Deaf person cannot see other's person face. Deaf people often times become very frustrated and just give up and end up not going to where they wanted to go to.

Each evening we usually went to an amazing, really cool, Pub in the Castle. It was fun socializing and connecting with all the other participants’ students and staff alike. - But made for very short nights of sleep. I must say great time - Again, AMAZING experiences!