Some stories are just too painful to tell.
A rooster crows. A gaggle of a dozen or so ducks waddle around the eggplants, pepper plants and cocoa plants growing beside an unstable-looking timber-framed hut with bamboo walls. The hut has two rooms, a dirt floor throughout and one mattress on a bamboo frame that the whole family sleep on. We are miles from anywhere in the jungle outskirts of a tiny town called Tasta near Ligao, Philippines.
It is here I meet Mary Ann.
Mary Ann is difficult to interview because despite my probing, she has, it seems, little story to tell, no interest in telling it, and almost no signing skills to relay it even if she had something interesting to say.
Feeling a little frustrated with her chronic introversion, I work hard to get some basic information from her.
She is 20. She lives with her mother, her step-father and her two step-siblings aged 5 and 3. She likes gardening and cooking. She has been deaf all her life. That’s about it.
I ask her mother for a little more background. Mary Ann has only had one year of deaf schooling. This would explain why her signing is so poor. She stopped attending school because her family had no money and Mary Ann had no sponsor. So her mother went out to work and Mary Ann stayed home to take care of her infant step-siblings. She doesn’t complain about this. She misses school and she longs to see her classmates again but she knows that she has responsibilities toward her family.
Hearing this, I regret my impatience with her. In her 20 years, she has had only 1 year of meaningful education. She has never learned to communicate. She has learned no life skills. What hope does she have?
I close the interview, despondent about Mary Ann’s lack of education and still a little flustered with the non-story of her life.
But Mary Ann does have a story.
It’s not that she can’t tell me, it’s that it’s simply too painful to tell. In Blog #34 (Maria) I wondered why we don’t just leave people alone in their ‘idyllic’ little settings and concluded that it’s because “it’s a jungle out there and no-one – no-one – is untouched by the brokenness of the world or the ugliness of sin.”
Mary Ann has been hurt by brokenness and sin.
DMI’s Fishermen of Christ Learning Center Principal Annabelle later filled me in. Recently, a man promised Mary Ann money for nude photos. A victim of poverty and naivety, she agreed but she was never given any money. The photos, instead, were sent to Anabelle to shame and/or blackmail Mary Ann. Mary Ann was so mortified (and frustrated with her lack of schooling) she twice tried to commit suicide by cutting herself.
What can we do for Mary Ann?
Annabelle went to her home, talked to her mother, and made ways for her to attend school again. Mary Ann is now back at the Fishermen of Christ Learning Center receiving an education, experiencing the compassionate love of Christian community and for the first time in her life, ‘hearing’ the Gospel. Here is where hope is found. This is how lives are changed.
But Mary Ann still has no sponsor. For the cost of a couple of pizzas, you can sponsor Mary Ann and others like her – there are many – and give her a new story.
Give her something to talk about. Because some stories are too good not to tell.
If you would like to sponsor Mary Ann, or any of our students, teachers or pastors, please click on the donate button below, or mail to info@deafmin.org
Keep up the great work…God is proud of you.