Goal of the event:
We wanted to inform the society about what EXCHANGEABILITY is. At the same time we wanted to raise awareness for speech and hearing imparied people by using sign language. Exchangeability is a long-term project of Erasmus Student Network. It was developed to increase the possibilities for our disabled friends to join the Erasmus mobility and make ESN an accessible organization. Moreover, we would like to create awareness for ‘deaf and hearing-impaired people’ among our local and exchange friends, and to learn the basic level of sign language all together.
Short description of the event:
When we realized that there is a café which has speech and hearing-impaired employees, we desired to go there in order to donate small amount of money for these people by buying coffee and to raise awareness for them at the same time sharing the moment with our exchange friends. Firstly, we learnt how to order a coffee and say "thank you" in sign language by ipad which stands at the entrance of the café. After that we started to our workshop by learning basics of sign language and communicate with each other. Our workshop are directed by speech and hearing-impaired employee and a lady without hindrance who translated the meaning of sings. After the short-time practice, all of us were able to tell our names, thank you, our school name, and nice to meet you in international sign language, we also made a movie of this unique experience! At the end of our short trainee and workshop, Cem, -our hearing imparied teacher- explained our purpose and what Exchangeability is in sign language for other disabled people. We made a subtitles for this moments in our aftermovie
How did your event go?:
Everything went perfect with full of emotions. Everyone tried to understand this language because we knew that it was only way to communicate with them, feel them and pushing our limits at the same time. Some of exchange students were so curious about this language and they had many questions. When they asked their questions, it was easy to realize their excitement from their eyes. We are still so thankful for these lovely people to host us and share the time with us ! We will go on to use what we learnt with sign language, by doing sign language tandems and other events.
