Equal opportunity is a myth for the deaf

ILOILO CITY, Philippines — The moment I picked up the phone and strained to hear the voice on the other line, I sensed trouble. From the little that I could hear, I gathered the man wanted to interview me for a home-based writing job for “Asia’s leading English language newspaper.”

Since I could not hear him clearly, I asked my mother to jot down the man’s phone number so I could call him back on my mobile phone. He tells my mother not to bother as he would call me.

And so started the job interview with me adjusting my mobile phone to its loudest volume. The interviewer asked me to talk about myself, then asked other questions related to my career and their need for a full-time business writer who knows how to transcribe interviews of foreign businessmen and write articles about global companies.

I said I am passionate about writing and have been a professional journalist in the last 15 years, contributing news stories and features on lifestyle and business to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He asked me to elaborate on the difference of business articles from other journalistic articles. He also wanted to know my thoughts on having to stay at home just writing.

‘Person with disability’

As I answered his questions, I felt elated at being interviewed for this writing job, which I believed I was highly qualified for.

From the resumé I sent him, the interviewer already knew I hold a Bachelor of Secondary Education degree, major in English, cum laude, from the West Visayas State University in Iloilo City. The same resumé states that as a fellow of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (Ford-IFP), I graduated on Feb. 13, 2009, with a Master of Journalism degree with a distinction grade and three Top of Class awards from Bond University in Queensland, Australia.

No one reading my resumé would even assume that I am officially what the Philippines Magna Carta for Disabled Persons calls a PWD—person with disability, specifically, a partially deaf one because of my severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss.

I can recognize sounds but cannot decipher the words without my hearing aids.

After teaching English and Creative Writing for seven years in a public high school (while working as a part-time journalist), I rested for a year, prepared for my postgraduate studies; now that I have a master’s degree, I decided to take on full-time writing work.

“If you don’t get an e-mail by noontime tomorrow, that means you did not get the job,” said the interviewer who did not mention anything about me taking a test to check my transcription and writing skills for this Hong Kong-based high-profile publication.

As the fate of the deaf in Asia would have it, I did not get the job.

A sense of injustice

The following evening after checking my e-mail countless times, I could not sleep well. I felt a certain sense of injustice. I was at a loss for words to describe the wrenching, wretched feeling of not belonging, of disappointment, of not being given what was due me as a PWD (This acronym somehow sounds wrong).

I do not mind not getting the job, but I do mind that companies give me the time of day to show that I know how to transcribe interviews and write features about global companies based on these interviews.

A partially deaf person who can transcribe? You will be amazed at how the hearing impaired can innovate and use whatever available resources to get their work done. Ask my editors—they have yet to hear of my interview subjects complaining that I misquoted them in any of my articles. God is kind enough to equip the likes of us with the wherewithal to overcome our disabilities.

I am one of 650 million people who live with a disability, making up 10 percent of the world’s population—the largest minority, according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Worse, the UN says women with disabilities are recognized to be disadvantaged several times over, “experiencing exclusion on account of their gender and their disability.”

Discrimination in all its forms is something I am very familiar with since I partially lost my hearing at the age of 6 because of a very high fever. My young life was spent battling intolerance at the kindergarten playground and the taunting of insensitive schoolmates prior to my getting life-saving hearing aids in high school, where I was bullied for being weird and different. Ever since, I have struggled to overcome the obstacles of being hearing-impaired.

The humane among us

I only learned the real meaning of equal opportunity for the disabled when the Ford-IFP in 2006 took me in as one of its fellows. Prior to that, the Philippine Social Science Council that administers the fellowship treated me like everyone else as I went through a screening process, a battery of tests, interviews, trainings, medical exams and international qualifying exams, such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Record Exams.

People dealing with me were told I was hearing-impaired and should modulate their voices a few decibels higher or seat me in front during lectures. That was enough for me.

At the Bond University, which has very competent Disability Services, the liaison officer would e-mail professors about my disability and the professors, in turn, would make sure I hear everything and remind me to let them know if I needed any other assistance. Classmates were very helpful and the only person who accidentally made fun of me when I had to ask him to repeat what he said profusely apologized upon learning I was hearing-impaired.

The Ford-IFP and Bond University renewed my faith that society could be humane.

Having experienced what real equal opportunity is like, should I be blamed for feeling a sense of injustice because a company based my competence on a sole telephone interview?

Should I be denied my righteous indignation for understanding that three of the eight guiding principles in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities entered into force on May 3, 2008, calls for nondiscrimination of the disabled, that they be allowed “full and effective participation and inclusion in society” and that they be given equality of opportunity?

I am not sure what to think of a global publication that has committed an act of discrimination, according to the Philippines Magna Carta for Disabled Persons, because it failed to administer an employment test that accurately reflects the skills and aptitude of the disabled applicant.

Should I blame the telephone company for not knowing that one of the rights and privileges of the hearing-impaired under the Magna Carta is special telephone services or units for the hearing-impaired? Or are they playing deaf that as part of their corporate responsibility, they must make phone services for the hearing-impaired commercially available?

No one even picks up the phone at the local office of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. when you inquire about such things, and if they do, it’s to say they do not have very loud phones.

The UN and the disabled

On April 14-16, 2009, the UN held the Expert Group Meeting on Mainstreaming Disability in the Millennium Development Goals’ policies, processes and mechanisms at the World Health Headquarters in Geneva.

The urgency of the meeting is explained: “The high numbers of persons with disabilities who are disproportionately represented among the world’s most marginalized groups have a profound significance with respect to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, which thus far seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the international discourse on the Goals.”

The UN furthers says the world is now at the halfway point to the target date of 2015, yet in the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, persons with disabilities as a group are not mentioned, and the issue of disability is briefly mentioned twice.

That the world has finally noticed the plight of the disabled is good news even though the voice of hope took a long time to be heard. The UN also notes that comparative studies on disability legislation shows that only 45 countries have antidiscrimination and other disability-specific laws.

Fighting intolerance

I am very sure I am not the only one who has stories to tell about the travails of being a hearing-impaired person in this part of Asia. Some could not find their voices because of circumstances: extreme poverty, abuse, neglect, lack of education, lack of opportunities. I am one of the very few who have gone this far as a PWD, and while grateful over my luck, I shake my head over the mountains the likes of us have to climb.

Meantime, I have decided to employ myself and contribute to the betterment of journalism education. I’m saving up for an LCD projector so I can give journalism and writing workshops in the towns and islands of Panay for a reasonable fee. In this way, student publications could save money because they need not go to Iloilo City and spend several times over for food and accommodations.

The income I get will then be used to pay for the printing of booklets on journalism that has Filipino examples and suited to the needs of our island’s young campus writers. More importantly, I would have money to buy a new set of hearing aids in the event the current ones (again, bought through the kindness of Ford-IFP) I use break down.

I refuse to let an intolerant society get the better of me. Along the way, I will speak loudly so that the voice of the disabled will drown out the harshness of the less-than-humane amongst us. –Hazel P. Villa, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Hazel Villa can be contacted at hpvilla@yahoo.com.