Hey, y'all! The actually interview with my professor was some 85 minutes long, but I'm parsing it down bit-by-bit. Here's a piece of the interview. It's not a clean audio yet, but I am too excited about it not to share. I transcribed the audio for the deaf and HoH.
Jonathan Webb has had decades of experience with working in the deaf world. Here is one of his many experiences.
Transcript:
So my name is Jonathan Webb and currently I am a lecturer at Iowa State University in the department of World Languages and Cultures. Specifically, I was brought in to establish the American Sign Language program here. I started interacting with deaf individuals when I was 10. Um, I cannot remember how old I was, I think I was 16 when I had my first job with deaf folks. Um, I became a life skills workers. So I worked with deaf individuals who were denied language access, had no language at all; no American Sign Language, no English, nothing. Uh, it felt very rewarding at times. Very rewarding at times. Other times it felt very depressing. Well you can imagine all these individuals didn't just have limited or no language, they also had uh, mental health issues that had cropped up because of the isolation they had experienced. These are people that weren't found until they were in their mid-20s, or their 30s, or 40s. Their parents had just hidden them away.
The time that was the most frightening for me, I feel like I remember thinking, "I, as a 16 year-old, should not be in this situation."
So, we had a time set up that were supposed to meet that he wasn't there one day. So then, I went back a day or two later and he's still nowhere to be found. And after a week, I'm like, okay, something's going on. I went down and said, "Can you go in and check-- I just need you to check on him and make sure that he's not in there, or something's gone awry and what not."
And so he just hands me the keys. In this complex, they just hand me the keys. So I go in with the keys and I open the door and the stench just hit me in the face. And my first thought is "Oh my god, he's dead and he's been rotting."
So I go in. Everything's off and the place is a wreck, total wreck. So I go over and I see this huge mass on the, on the, uh, on the couch, with a blanket over it. And I'm like, "Oh my god, he's dead."
And there's no way for me to prove that he's dead or he's a live without touching him because... he's deaf. So I went up and I was sure that he was dead. I was sure. So I went up and just started gently moving, and all of the sudden he pops up out of the blanket. I about shit my pants. I, I just freaked out. Um. He had been beaten up. Someone had broken in and they had ransacked the place and just beat the hell out of them. And so he had been laying there for days, just bruises and blood, and I'm guessing in and out of consciousness, I'm not quite sure. So we got him, we got him helped, we got him taken care of. We got him cleaned up, um....
