[dbaust] First Deaf-Blind Student At Harvard Law Pursues Dreams
- From: "Di Hartman" <diandjon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <dbaust@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2014 10:47:57 +1100
First Deaf-Blind Student At Harvard Law Pursues Dreams
At the age of 15, Haben Girma had danced, skied, kayaked and traveled to
Mali. And although that's a lot for any young person to
experience, Haben was doing so while deaf and blind.
After realizing the power of law, she decided she wanted to pursue a career
as a disability rights attorney. Today she is the first
deaf-blind student at Harvard Law School. Host Frank Stasio talks to her
about her experience with disability rights advocacy.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Nadia D'Amato
Frank Stasio: This is the "State of Things" broadcasting from the American
Tobacco Historical District. I'm Frank Stasio. At
fifteen-years-old, Haben Girma had skied, kayaked, cycled, danced, and
traveled to Mali without her parents. That's a lot for any
teenager, but Haben was doing all those things while deaf and blind. And her
adventures didn't stop there. She has since become the
first deaf-bind student to graduate from Harvard Law School. Haben is a
disability rights advocate who is thinking deeply about the
ways people with disabilities move through the world. She's giving a talk at
the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill today at
2:00, but first she joins us on the program, and Camara Lash is here as her
assistant. Welcome.
Haben Girma: Thank you so much for welcome here--welcoming me here. It's an
honor to be here and I look forward to meeting with
students later this afternoon at the University of North Carolina Chapel
Hill.
Stasio: It's gonna be great I wanted to ask you, Haben, when you first
decided that you wanted to become an attorney.
Girma: I decided my second-to-last year of college, and at that time the
economy was really bad. And a lot of my friends who were
ahead of me in college--graduating seniors--were struggling to find work. So
I realized I needed to get--further my education and a
law degree would give me the flexibility to do a variety of things. The
other thing that really inspired me is that due to my
limited vision and limited hearing, I developed strengths in certain areas
and that was analyzing and problem-solving. Having a
disability means you're constantly dealing with obstacles, and a lifetime of
constantly dealing with obstacles has allowed me to
have really strong problem-solving skills, which is great as a lawyer.
Stasio: But clearly, if you were the first student to graduate--and I don't
know how many students may have gone to Harvard Law and
not finished--those obstacles must have been formidable for you to be the
first law school graduate from Harvard. Did you anticipate
the difficulties in going to law school as a deaf-blind student?
Girma: As someone who had never gone to law school before, it was hard to
anticipate the challenges. And Harvard Law had not had a
deaf-blind student before. They couldn't quite anticipate all the
challenges. But we met early on before I started and discussed
potential challenges and potential solutions And we continued to work
together to figure out how I would do oral arguments, how I
would take my exams, how to do internships over the summer. It was just
constant positive creative thinking, optimism, and we--we
made it. We got through it.
Stasio: Well, some of that you must have gone through in your undergrad
and--and even through--through all of your schooling, right?
I mean, how--how to handle the lectures? How to interpret and how to get
your work back to the professor? So, tell us a little bit
about that. How did you do it? How did you get through school?
Girma: So I use a variety of com--I use a variety of accommodations. So, for
my textbooks and course materials that are in written
format, teachers give that to the disability service office and they convert
it into braille. So when you have something in a
digital format, you put it in a program called Duxbury, and that program
embosses it in a print--in a braille printer of sorts. That
was when we had my materials. Another way is through digital braille, and
there are digital braille computers, maybe 20 different
kinds of them. And the one I have is called a BrailleNote, made by
HumanWare. So I could put files on a USB drive and put it in my
digital braille computer and read files on that computer. And right now,
here at the studio, as you ask questions, I have an
assistant, who's typing those questions on a wireless Apple keyboard, and
that's transmitted to my digital braille computer, and I
read it in digital braille. And that's one way--one method I use for
communication. I've used that at school, at work, and in social
settings.
Stasio: Now, obviously you are somebody who was very active and very
confident growing up. We talked about rock-climbing and
kayaking and all the activities that you were involved in Did you feel
limitations growing up? Did you--or let me put it another
way--did you have the sense that you really had to show people that
you--that you weren't limited?
Girma: Yes, and also I had to show myself because growing up there was a
part of me that always wasn't sure. Can I really
rock-climb? Can I really go to college and get a job? There's a social
message unfortunately in our society that says people with
disabilities can't achieve, can't succeed. And sometimes we inadvertently
internalize those messages. And growing up I was
struggling not to internalize those messages so I needed to convince myself
and convince people. And now I need to do less of that.
I'm fairly confident that I can do things and I don't need to convince
myself, and I'm less concerned about convincing other people,
because it's only to an extent that other people's opinions matter. You
can't let those opinions control your life.
Stasio: Tell us about that trip to Mali when you were fifteen years old and
volunteering on your own. What were you doing and how
did that trip go?
Girma: I was part of an organization called Build On, that builds schools in
third-world countries. And I asked the program
coordinator if I could go. And she said, "Absolutely!" She gave me the
application and I gave it to my father. And I told him, "I
want to help change the world! I want to help work towards world peace and
build schools in rural Mali, West Africa!" And my dad
actually grew up in Africa. He was highly aware of all the dangers in Africa
and he said, "There's snakes. There's malaria. It's not
safe. And you're deaf-blind. If you can't see a snake, what if you step on
it? And if someone were to warn you, 'Oh, there's a
snake! Watch out, Haben!' you might not hear them." And my dad's points were
very valid. He was right, and he loved me. He was just
concerned for my safety. So I--I was trying to do this balancing act of
assuring my father that I would be safe, and that the trip
would go well, but also, trying to figure out how would I avoid those
dangers? And how do I overcome my own fear of snakes and
feeling like a burden for this group who's trying to build schools?
Stasio: So that gets back to this added skill--this--this kind of genius
that you have for problem-solving because you're always
faced with these challenges of trying to prove to yourself, and others I
guess, that it's gonna be okay.
Girma: Right, it was hard to prove to myself and prove to others that I
would be okay. In that situation, what I ended up doing is I
brought the program coordinator into the conversation and I told her my
father's concern for my safety. And actually I'm also a
little nervous and concerned for my safety too. She said, "We've never had a
deaf-blind student attend this program and build
schools in Mali. But I'm willing to make it work. We'll find a way." And so
she and my father talked and we realized that I would
never be alone. I would always have a team. We were going to be a community
of high-school students and teachers going to help this
village. And she was absolutely right. When I was at the village, I always
and people around me. My host family was wonderful. And I
was out there, digging and mixing cement and building that school. But I
also had people to describe, "All right this is where the
bricks go and straight ahead ten feet into the left is where we're going to
have dinner." So a combination of teamwork and support,
and assuring my father that we would all be together, and to trust me to be
careful was our--was our eventual solution to the--to
the dilemma.
Stasio: So I want to take you back to law school now, and Harvard, and some
of the challenges there. And you talked about
getting--getting your material translated into braille. So that's one way
that you can use technology, but then you ran into another
challenge that maybe you hadn't anticipated, and that's how--how are you
going to get the lunch menus? Tell us--tell us that story.
Girma: Um, so the--the lunch menu story was actually in college. The college
cafeteria prints out menus and puts it in front of the
cafeteria. But I couldn't read the menus, so they advised me to ask people
to read the menus to me. The college cafeteria's very
loud and noisy, and it was really difficult to hear people. So for the first
few months I said, oh well, I just need to eat. It
really doesn't matter too much what I eat. So I'd go up to the counter and
hand them my plate and they would put food on it. And
then when I sat down I'd found out--I'd find out what they'd served. But
eventually, I--I realized that I wanted to be able to
choose what I eat, especially since I'm paying for this service. And school
gets stressful, and sometimes it's nice to know
chocolate cake at station 4! Yes! So that you can relax and enjoy and
prepare for the next exam. [Frank laughing] So I asked the
cafeteria to email me the menu. Ideally, I'd love to have it in braille, but
if they couldn't do that, then they could just email me
the menu because they print it out. It's already in digital format for them.
They said, "all right" but they failed to do that.
They'd send it to me once every two days, or not at all for awhile, and I
came again and asked, and they said "sorry we're too
busy". But again I was paying for this service and it's--it's stressful
already to be a student and to be studying for exams, and on
top of that I had no choice about what I would eat, and I was eating three
meals a day at this cafeteria. I was staying at the
dorms. So eventually I told the managers that under the Americans with
Disabilities Act, they were required to make reasonable
accommodations, and easily emailing a menu is a very reasonable
accommodation. And reminding them about the law really made a huge
difference. It changed their attitude from "this is a favor we can do when
we have a spare time" to "this is actually an important
thing we need to do; she's paying for this service, and she should be able
to choose what food she's going to eat".
Stasio: And I guess this brings us to the importance of your work as a
disabilities advocate. Could you tell us about that and what
you intend to do as an attorney who specializes in that kind of advocacy?
Girma: So, right now I work at Disability Rights Advocates in Berkley,
California. They have two offices--one in Berkley and one in
New York. And they do high-impact litigation. They look for large problems
of discrimination and work to improve access to
education, employment, life for people with disabilities. And it's
non-profit, no charge to the clients for the good cause of making
the world a better place. My issue over there is education and I work on
education cases for students with disabilities throughout
the country.
Stasio: What are some of the big challenges? You know, it's obvious to me
that digital technology in some ways can make it easier,
but I guess not everybody has access to that and so is that one of the
challenges, to make sure that deaf-blind students and others
with disabilities have access to the technology that would make it better?
Girma: One of the biggest issues is definitely technology, and the funny
thing is, technology has the potential to make life so much
easier, rather than having print books for sighted students and braille
books for blind students, you can give students one device,
like an iPad, and everyone can read it. Because the iPad has the potential
to provide information in various formats--audio, large
print, regular print, and it connects to digital braille displays. So what I
want to try to stress to universities is that when they
invest in new technologies, when they build online learning tools, think
about accessibility because there are small changes you can
make that would make it easily accessible to hundreds and hundreds of
students.
Stasio: What does it mean to you to be the first deaf-blind student to
graduate from Harvard?
Girma: One interesting little tidbit? Helen Keller actually went to
Radcliffe College, which is now part of Harvard. So I'm not
quite the first deaf-blind student at Harvard, but I think I am the first
deaf-blind student at Harvard Law School What that means
to me is that we've come a long way in terms of social barriers. Twenty
years ago, I don't think we would have had the social
environment at Harvard for administrators to say, "Yes! We're willing to
make this work!" and sit and think about creative solutions
for making this possible. Nor did we have the technology twenty years ago,
like digital braille displays, to make this possible. So
the fact that a deaf-blind student graduated from Harvard Law School says
that Harvard, and the country as a whole, has come a long
way in allowing students with disabilities--even so-called "severe"
disabilities--to get an education and find meaningful work.
Stasio: Now, you--you referenced Helen Keller and of course, she was an
important role model. But now that you say it, she's the
only other one I can think of. Are there others? And--and is that something
that you're, in a sense, trying to do, to create a
larger body of role models and people who we can look to?
Girma: There is a community of Deaf-Blind people here in the U.S. Not large,
but more than me, for sure. [laughing] And we--and so,
off the top of my head I can think of five lawyers in the United States and
one in Sweden who are deaf-blind. And deaf-blind
individuals in other fields doing great work. And they all use a combination
of communication styles from tactile sign language to
voice to digital braille, close-up signing. The Deaf-Blind community is very
diverse. Some have additional disabilities, different
levels of vision and hearing. The stereotype is a deaf-blind person's
completely deaf-blind like Helen Keller, but I use the term
"deaf-blind" to steer away from hierarchies. Rather than dividing up the
community into partially-sighted, totally-blind,
hard-of-hearing, totally-deaf, use terms that bring us together and bring
more people together so that the deaf--the disability
community can ask for legislation, ask for policies, that makes--that make a
larger difference.
Stasio: Haben, what is your message today for the students and those who
are--will be in your audience at the University of North
Carolina?
Girma: My message to students today is to think of themselves as part of a
community, regardless of whether they have a disability
or not. That they are part of community, and should help each other out.
Students who have differences, like disabilities, should be
excited to identify as someone with a disability. So I mentioned earlier
that I choose to identify as blind even though I have a
little vision. I used to say that I was "partially-sighted", but that breaks
up the community, so the more united and together we
are, the more we help each other out, the stronger the whole community is.
And the legal system, the Americans with Disabilities
Act--operates on the identification of people who come forward and say "I
would like this kind of accommodation. I identify as
someone with a disability." So the more we have iden--people identify with a
disability, and supporting each other in a community, I
think the stronger a community we would have.
Stasio: Haben, it was a great pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much
for being with us.
Girma: Thank you so much for having me here. It's been an honor.
***
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- » [dbaust] First Deaf-Blind Student At Harvard Law Pursues Dreams - Di Hartman