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The Green Festival experience.

Last Saturday was a great day where I got to attend an event dubbed the Green Festival in New York City with two of my classmates from my American Sign Language (ASL) class. ASL is a language used by the deaf for communication using signs primarily made by hands (Sternberg 1981). Before we purchased our tickets for the events we had earlier emailed the ASL representative for the festival so that we could at least be certain of a place in the event’s presentations.

On the material day of the event, we arrived and went to the ASL booth to sign in on the presentation that we would attend. We noticed 4 to 5 other people who were also signing in for different presentations which were also offering ASL interpretation services. We proceeded to the counter where we found a lady doing the registration of the people who had come to attend the various presentations. We made ourselves known to her and also informed her that we had emailed a lady by the name Deanna earlier to inform her about our attendance of a presentation that was also offering ASL interpretation services. Amazingly, it so happened that the lady we were talking with was the same lady we had emailed.

Deanne informed us that there was an organic beauty product presentation that was going on in theatre B and she directed us to the place using ASL since the venue of the whole event was fairly large and there were a number of activities going on simultaneously. Initially as she was directing us she was too fast and we had a problem following up but luckily another user of ASL noticed that we were not keeping pace with Deanne and asked her to slow down. It is then that she realized she was a little bit too fast for us and apologized that she forgot we were ASL students. She continued to direct us slowly and we understood what she said.

We afterwards headed to theatre B as we had been directed and found that the presentation had just begun. We noticed 2 interpreters and about 4 to 5 deaf people who attended the same presentation. I found myself learning a lot of vocabularies some of which are, strawberry, beauty products, brown sugar, white vinegar, coconut, melt, plastic, body lotion, sun burn and so on. I also realized interestingly that I understood the translation with ease and that I was able to follow questions that were raised by the deaf people. The communication was very clear to me.

Another interesting experience was that my 2 classmates and I decided that we shall not communicate in English but we shall use ASL from the beginning of the event till we left the event. The most amazing thing and that made it a great experience was the fact that we were communicating with ASL in real life and we were able to learn from one another. We could easily explain terms to one another that were relayed using ASL instead of English.

Works Cited

Sternberg, Martin L. A.. American sign language: a comprehensive dictionary. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Print.