Deaf Club Is Seeking Funds For New Rooms

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28425, 4 November 1957, Page 2

Deaf Club Is Seeking Funds For New Rooms

The Christchurch Deaf Club ■ will launch an appeal to raise! funds for a new clubroom next 1 Friday, when a stall for the sale of home-made sweets, cakes, and produce will be conducted in Cathedral square. The club, which meets at present in the Trades Hall, has recently bought a section at 295 Fitzgerald avenue, where the new clubroom will «be built when funds have been raised. The 99 men and women of the club are cut off in many ways from community life by their disability. All have been educated at the School for the Deaf at Sumner, but once their education has been completed and they are earning their own living among persons with hearing, their lives become totally different. They find themselves among strangers who often lack patience with them and understanding of their disability.

They olten find themselves cut off from their companions, and without means of expressing themselves. They are therefore unable to make friends with many persons outside their former school companions.» They like to meet for companionship and to help one another in their difficulties. They learn to speak and to understand spoken words almost by lip-reading, but among themselves expression of ideas and thoughts and events is quite easy, as many have been school companions for years at the school.

Unless they can find some means of meeting their friends they become very lonely and unhappy. The club hopes to raise enough money to erect a building large enough for members to enjoy games such as table tennis, badminton. and indoor bowls. There they can meet and discuss their workaday affairs and problems, and have games and supper, which the women like to cook and the men enjoy taking round.

Some of the members who attended a meeting of the club on Saturday evening said they worked as tailors, or tailoresses, factory workers, or in offices. Several own and drive their own cars. One helper at the club said that deaf persons were very good at driving as they were more alert than the person with I hearing, and never trusted to luck. They said that they liked to go to the pictures, but preferred pictures with the story told in the action, as words or a commentary were harder to understand than movement. One member showed a film of his recent trip to Fiordland. It was entirely self-explanatory. A young upholsterer said that he liked his work very much. One young man said that he tapdanced, and another who was wearing the blazer of a wellkhown Rugby football team said • that he played in the forwards. | Miss Eunice McEntee is em-. ployed in a factory, and said that 1 she has a deaf girl friend called I Jean. She boards in a hostel and . has no parents. Mr and Mrs David Sinclair have a baby girl called 1 Maryann, who is only seven yeeks

Christchurch Deaf Club Street Appeal. This Friday. Bth Novemrequired.

old. Miss Robin Campbell, a typist and book-keeper, said that she loved making clothes. She was wearing a mushroom pink brocaded cotton frock and pale blue coat which looked exactly right with her curly brown hair and fair skin. A married woman member said her chief delight was to cook for her husband and two sons. Her husband said he had been employed for 13 years in the Public Service and had five other deaf employees working in that department, though all were not doing the same kind of job. One young woman has a dog which always lets her know by his behaviour if anyone is approaching when the family have gone out. This young woman can do almost anything that can be done by persons with hearing. The president (Mr Vernon Pope) presided at the meeting on Saturday evening.