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To hear, and be heard

For a town as home to deaf people who want to live together It would be designed for them: lots of open space so people could see each other signing...

SALEM (U.S.): Even when the rain pelts the prairie, the soil thickens to mud and the pungent smell of cattle lingers in the air, Marvin Miller thinks this is the perfect place to be a pioneer. And he has one very bold idea: he wants to build a new town where there is none, a community that would be carved out of the farm fields and draw hundreds of people from across the United States — maybe even the world.

What would set this town apart is it would be home to deaf and hard-of-hearing people who want to live together. They will raise their families here, send their kids to school and share a common language: sign language. Police and politicians would sign, so would teachers and shopkeepers.

Mr. Miller says people who are deaf, as he is, often are isolated and frustrated by a hearing world that wields the power that shapes their lives. By forming a town, he says, they will have the unity and political clout they are lacking now.

"This will allow us to make decisions on what happens to us as a whole," he says through a sign-language interpreter. "Don't like something? It's up to us to make the change. Today we can't do that. The whole point... is to create a choice that we currently do not have."

Mr. Miller has a name for his town: Laurent, for Laurent Clerc, a French educator who co-founded the first deaf school in America. He has a reservation list, too: About 125 families, from New York to California, along with a few from foreign countries have signed up. Most are deaf or have deaf relatives, but everyone is welcome.

Mr. Miller's plan is still very much that — a plan. And a debate is on. The prospect of building Laurent has not only divided folks here over whether it would bring prosperity or headaches, but it also has raised a larger cultural question: Is this a good idea for deaf people?

It is a Herculean job to create a town. Bringing Laurent to life would require tens of millions of dollars, years of work and a few thousand pioneers willing to leave their homes and move to a wind-swept prairie where cattle outnumber people by more than 7-to-1.

Some doubt Laurent will ever come to be. Mr. Miller does not. He and his partner, M.E. Barwacz, who also is his mother-in-law, began studying possible locations four years ago. They formed The Laurent Company in 2003 after deciding on McCook County— lots of land, few people (5,864 residents, about 10 per square mile or 2.6 square km). Carolyn and Larry Brick, retired educators who are deaf, travelled from Pennsylvania to attend after their son, a lawyer and long-time Miller friend, told them about Laurent. "When I first heard about it, I grabbed my husband and said, `We have to go there. We have to give our support,'" Ms. Brick said in interviews conducted by e-mail and through an interpreter who relayed questions through a video hookup.

The town would be designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing: Lots of open space so people could see each other signing. More flashing lights on emergency vehicles. And a video service with interpreters signing phone conversations to deaf people who have monitors in their homes.

"If Laurent is built, it would a one-of-a-kind community in America. Even so, it is not a new idea. Deaf people have long yearned for a place of their own, dating back to the early 19th century when activists talked about forming their own state. Large numbers of deaf people also have lived in certain communities, most notably Martha's Vineyard, in Massachusetts, where they and their hearing neighbours both used sign language in everyday life for 250 years. The practice faded by the early 20th century, according to H-Dirksen Bauman, Professor of Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University in Washington.

Signing communities still exist in Israel and Bali, Prof. Bauman says.

The Laurent idea revives age-old questions about assimilating deaf people into the hearing society. Prof. Bauman says there have long been contentious debates over whether deaf people should use sign or spoken language, attend special schools or be mainstreamed with hearing children and more recently, have cochlear implant surgery to improve hearing.

AP

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