Far And Away: Reporting From The Brink Of Change - Plot & Excerpts
After the frustrations of our Antarctica trip, John and I were pleased to stop in Bali on the way home so that I could pursue this research. When I described Bengkala as an idyll in Far from the Tree, some readers supposed I was enthusing about the primitive lives of noble savages. I would never want to gloss over the struggles of people in villages such as this one. It is utopian only from a disability-rights perspective. Deaf people the world over experience social exclusion; a society in which everyone can sign responds to a common dream of shared fluency even if that idyll is circumscribed by the toil of subsistence farming in an impoverished locale. In the small village of Bengkala in northern Bali, a congenital form of deafness has persisted for some 250 years; at any time, it affects about 2 percent of the population. Everyone in Bengkala has grown up with deaf people and knows the unique sign language used in the village, so the gap between the experience of hearing and deaf people is narrower than perhaps anywhere else in the world.
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