...meeting adults.
Jeantine used to have an internship as a social worker at the Dutch Foundation for Deaf and Hearing Impaired Children and she was our family counselor.
In order to meet deaf adults other than Jeantine, our parents had gotten deaf people to be our babysitters. Really great.
That was mighty interesting and it also allowed us to see what it was like to be a deaf adult. We had no clue, after all.
We had questions like: can deaf people live on their own? And can they cook? We saw then that all of that was perfectly possible.
We could talk about all kinds of things. For example whether deaf people can drive and what kind of educational options there were. I learned a lot from that.
Our parents also realized that it's important for deaf children to meet deaf adults. Really special.
I don't know, because we didn't know any deaf people back then and we didn't know what was possible. We had no examples.
You don't really see many deaf people on the streets, for example. So when they came to our house, we were just very curious.
–Those things weren't very important to me. I cared more about being read to. The babysitter had to be good at reading to us.
-Yeah, being read to in sign language, that was great. –Our parents were decent at it, but Anka...
When she would read to us with her hand gestures and her way of storytelling, I would completely lose myself in it.
Whenever a babysitter came over, I immediately wanted them to read.
I think because we were read to, I started to love reading and that really contributed to our Dutch language skills.
–Yeah, I agree. –How that went?
Well... yeah, before we went to bed. Or just in the afternoon, that also happened.
We were sitting kind of half next to, half opposite each other and she would tell the story in sign language and show us the pictures.
–When I was five years old we had a party, a birthday party with hearing and deaf children. I used to have lots of hearing friends.
We'd ask if Anka could come read to us. That was always amazing and the hearing kids would get to see what sign language looked like.