Using Your Personal Struggles as Your Personal Story with Emma Faye Rudkin

Emma Faye: [00:00:00] I think you have to tap into the hard parts of your story to see how it’s going to be used for good. So, one of my favorite things is God uses your deepest pain as launchpad for your greatest calling. So purpose in your life is tapping into the places you may not want to tap into. But, that’s going to bring ultimate healing to you, which can be used for ultimate healing of other people.

Hope: Do you want to wake up feeling like you are stepping into who you are meant to be? Into the best possible version of you? What if I told you that the key to your best life, health, and happiness are all around you? You just have to find what works for you. I’m Hope Pedraza and I believe that there isn’t just one way to live a healthy and meaningful life and that all you need is a little inspiration to make changes that last from the inside out.

Each week I’ll be sharing tangible tips and inspirational interviews to help you on your journey. These are the steps to take to improve your life and live with purpose. This is Hopeful and Wholesome. [00:01:00] Hey y’all, welcome to Hopeful and Wholesome. Thanks so much for listening today. Today I have on Emma Faye Rudkin.

She is an international role model for the deaf and hard of Hearing community and the founder of a non profit, Aid This Silent. She has made it her life’s mission to speak for economically disadvantaged deaf children and teens to really reach their full potential and live life to the fullest, which is exactly what she’s doing herself.

She’s really one of the sweetest, most passionate people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Her life is the ultimate testimony to overcoming challenges and obstacles and not letting those hold you back from your purpose. Her story is for sure going to inspire you and will most definitely brighten your day.

Y’all enjoy Emma Faye, give her a follow and take a look at her nonprofit, see how you can help contribute to that. Y’all enjoy. All right, y’all. So let’s get going. I am so excited to bring on Emma Faye today. She is really an inspiration and living with purpose. It just, It’s totally connected, everything we talk about here on this podcast.

And so we’re going to talk about her and her journey and her cause, Aid the [00:02:00] Silent, everything else she’s doing. She’s doing a lot of amazing things. So thank you so much for joining me today, Emma Faye. 

Emma Faye: Thanks for having me. I love how social media, you can meet online friends. 

Hope: Totally. 

Emma Faye: We’re going to be friends, but we’re not met yet.

Hope: Exactly. 

It’s so true. I love that. Yes. So, I typically like to save the, like, personal journey stories for a little later when we start talking, but I feel like we can’t talk about anything else, including your foundation, until you talk about your story and your journey on living with hearing loss. So, can you just give everyone the long or short version, it’s your choice, your journey with hearing loss.

Emma Faye: Thank you for asking about that. I mean, really, my life points to so much learning ways to live with something that the world sees as a disability and how God is going to use that because so much Of what I’ve experienced from being a young child and realizing [00:03:00] that life just isn’t fair. And, it’s hard to find out when you’re so young.

And most people, you’re older when you find out life is hard and difficult. But really, my earliest memories are being four years old. And realizing that there was such a barrier between me and so many of my friends. And education. And just the world around me was really limited. So I found out I had hearing loss, my parents found out when I was about three is when I believed I lost my hearing and it just radically changed the course of my entire family’s life because 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents.

So isn’t that crazy? So really a lot of times That family, that’s the first time they’ve met someone deaf if they haven’t traveled. It’s a really life altering thing, especially if you’ve never been around it, you have [00:04:00] no idea what to do. 

Hope: Right, yeah. 

Emma Faye: It’s really overwhelming, and so I was their first child together.

It was just, Basically, they described that time period as just out of body experience, because all of a sudden you’re going to somebody else’s apartment, you stay at a place, you’re having to get humanized, so I was very much just taking an approach called listening unspoken language. And now I sign, so now I’m like a fluent signer, and speech, so I do both as an adult, but younger I just had speech.

So, to give you a picture of my wall, um, I would sit in front of a mirror with a speech therapist for hours. And just mimic what she was doing in the mirror. Wow. The way in my mouth that she was moving it. 

Hope: Like how? 

Emma Faye: To, um, put my hands on her lips, or on her throat. And you would feel the vibrations of different sounds.

So a lot of times, people don’t know that hearing loss [00:05:00] is not anything to do with amplification. Right. So that’s, um, And people think, oh, if I speak louder, if I slow down, so a lot of times they try to over emphasize, they try to shout, that doesn’t help at all, that actually makes it more difficult to understand.

So hearing loss has to do with missing sounds, um, like speech sounds. So if you look at speech, or the alphabet, most of it is like, the sounds in speech are C H S H and K S S. So what happened with me is I lost all of my high frequency sounds. 

So if you translate that into the alphabet or, I guess, speech board, you see that I’m missing so much of the high frequency sounds, which is most of the alphabet, really, with high frequencies.

But as an adult, I’ve lost more low frequencies. So I had about 15 to 20 percent of hearing left, and that’s it. 

Hope: So it progressively got worse as you got [00:06:00] older. 

Emma Faye: It did. Wow. That was what was really weird as an adult was all of a sudden you, I just had this massive drop. Um, it really had an effect on my mental health.

Sure. Um, a lot of things I struggled with, so my story as a child was I overcame this incredible difficulty being in isolation and being behind in education. I spent so much of my childhood trying to catch up with what anybody else was doing. So I had years of speech, about 10 years straight, of intensive speech from the time I was 3 to 13.

But to kind of give you a picture of how limited my world was, there were three words I could not say until I was about 18 years old. So I could not say hamburger, computer, computer. Wow. There’s a word I couldn’t say, and it’s a basic, simple word, but I just had no idea how you pronounced it. Yeah. So, what happens [00:07:00] is you become extremely embarrassed about saying things correctly.

Yeah. So you kind of avoid the words you know you can’t say, which limits your connection, limits your ability to express yourself, so you feel kind of trapped, um, but you can imagine someone like Helen Collier, and her story, she had no language for a long time, no way to express herself, so you’re just kind of trapped in that space, your own self, and that, that relational connection.

So that’s the wound of deaf people’s hearts, is that they’re missing out on that relational connection, and with real people, and being understood, and understanding someone. And Helen Keller had this beautiful quote that I always love to think about, and she was asked once in an interview, she was asked, since you have both perspectives of being blind and deaf, um, which is worse, which one would you think is worse?

And [00:08:00] she said, blindness separates me from the material, from things, but deafness separates me from people. So that’s the relational side. So that was the cry of my heart. And then, um, about the time I was 14 years old, I had a radical, life changing summer. But I went to this summer camp, and I heard for the first time that I was made with purpose.

beautifully made that my story was going to be used to help all sorts of people. And so I really believed and held on to the fact that God would give me joy and that he would give me purpose. So when I came back from that summer, about the time I was 14, everybody noticed something was different. And the way that they described it was that they saw that my face was different.

And yeah, I was different . So I started growing more and more and pursuing things that were on my heart and my biggest dreams. [00:09:00] The things I was afraid of like standing in front of people or acting, um, speaking in front of people, all of a sudden I gained this great confidence and a part of that was just believing that my story would be used to help people, which grew into what Aid the Silent is and that my organization does.

is I was only 18 years old when I started it. 

Hope: Wow. 

Emma Faye: It’s terrifying. I had no idea what I was doing, I had no money, I basically was forced advertising is how I did it, but I totally was making stuff up, honestly. So, the website literally said, apply for resources now. If you have a good hearing, classroom equipment.

Something called an FM system that helps a kid hear the teacher. Someone came up, speech, sign language. I was promoting that we could give this, but no money. So, [00:10:00] it was crazy, 18, no idea. So, it just grew so quickly that, it’s just crazy how it all started. But, someone gave me, I think it was 5, 000 dollars in the very beginning.

And that was just like, that was literally the cost of what a pair of hearing aids is. 

Hope: Wow. 

Emma Faye: And I’m often all of a sudden thinking, how do I leverage, how do I multiply this little amount that I’ve been given to do so much grander things, the things that I was falsely advertising? So, I came up with a campaign after getting so many letters from kids that were struggling with being deaf, or embarrassed about their speech, or hearing aids.

So I came up with this campaign called hashtag share your aid Share your human aid, share your cochlear implant, and then when we first started doing it I said a donor up to five thousand would get [00:11:00] five dollars per post So about two weeks later, I’m thinking this is not working. Nobody’s participating.

I’m a failure My day’s are staying as a fail And then at the end of two weeks, I started going all over texas It went viral in the United States, and then it started going to other countries, so, different languages, everywhere, all over the world, and that’s what gave the organization an international footing.

It exposed me to so many kids all over the world, and, and so I was able to start doing applications and fundraising. We had to hire people last summer. And so, as a young 18 year old girl, I had to do something so scary that I was not equipped for it. I had no skill sets for it. But now, Ava Silent is 5 years old.

Hope: Wow. 

Emma Faye: And so we’ve serviced, [00:12:00] this past year, we’ve serviced 229 children with hearing loss. 

Hope: That’s amazing. 

Emma Faye: Yes. So directly impacted their lives. 

Hope: Wow. 

Emma Faye: So it’s just crazy to look back and be like, wow, I didn’t know at 18 years old that I was doing, but now Totally we’ve impacted that many lives. It’s pretty amazing.

Hope: Totally. So when you’re servicing these kids What exactly are you providing for them that 200 whatever that you’ve helped so far? 

Emma Faye: So it’s all over the map So it can be a hearing aid Which is Typically not covered by insurance, or the families that we’re servicing are typically with Medicaid. But for now, what’s happening with Medicaid is they are not reimbursing the audiologists and doctors enough for them to even break even.

So, with Medicaid, it [00:13:00] actually costs the audiologist. Sometimes about a thousand dollars out of pocket to send it. So it’s a messed up system, because the way they factored the cost isn’t taking into account all the additional fitting fees and mold, they just don’t take into account the whole cost. So that’s what’s happening behind the scenes with that.

So we kind of have to, we help bypass. A lot of the, not broken systems, but they’re not adaptive systems. So by the time the child finally gets to study this, they’ve missed that important window of early intervention, of utilizing that technology in the first place. So we kind of come in and bypass a lot of the broken systems to help.

With the hearing aids, we have a system called an Adam system, which is a device the teacher wears, or a speaker on a field trip, even at home, or [00:14:00] kids that have after school sporting events, they wear that mic. It cuts out the background noise for that child, and it brings it into the hearing aids directly.

That’s an amazing piece of technology, and we help with sending kids to summer camp. So we have a big high school group that goes every summer, middle school group, and then now we’re working on an elementary local camp for them. So kids come over and we have a fully accessible camp week. So they have captioning, interpreting, they have translators and leaders who sign fluently.

Um, so they just feel really unclear on what’s happening, whatever they end up picking up. And then, A big part is we have, um, it’s called Deaf Education Enrichment. So we help send field trips for deaf kids. We provide the technology and the interpreting, captioning. So we have this technology we use, um, it’s basically a subwoofer.

And [00:15:00] it shows the vibrations of music. So we’ll take deaf kids to go see a ballet, and then they feel the music as it’s happening and they [unintelligible]. 

So, just a lot of different parts. Um, we’re one of the few organizations for hearing loss that serves both sides of the So we’ll support you, fund you to go learn sign language, which is the more strong Deaf culture side, and then we’ll help with the speech therapy and the technology side, which is what’s called, um, oral, so listening and spoken language side.

So we’ve also become this, this bridge between two different sides of the Deaf community that normally don’t get along. 

Hope: It’s normally a separate thing. You don’t get both. 

Emma Faye: Not, typically you don’t see both together. 

Hope: That’s crazy. 

Emma Faye: So what we do is we have a lot of events that are deaf awareness. So we have the people that have grown up and [00:16:00] only sign their entire lives.

And their primary language is ASL. And then we kind of have people like me where I’m in the middle. I can kind of do both. And then you have the strong, only speech, only he and I side. 

Hope: That’s interesting. 

So, for you, growing up, what was, I mean, I can only imagine just the struggle, the number of struggles that you had.

What was the biggest struggle or obstacle for you when you were growing up? 

Emma Faye: I think it was believing that I would never become much. You know, and what my parents instilled in me was a very different message. It was like, you can do anything, and you can sustain, and we’re gonna give you resources, but you still hear that little bit of a lie of, I’m not enough.

And I can’t overcome what I’m experiencing. So it was everything. I mean, it was friendships. I would think I wasn’t invited to a sleepover. So all week long, I would be devastated. [00:17:00] And then come Monday, you find out they told me that I just didn’t hear it. 

Hope: Oh no. 

Emma Faye: Things like that would happen a lot. I’m sure I would have to go and try to pay attention all day long.

My eyes would be so exhausted from lip reading. I would have books called Listening Fatigue so bad. So you should be warm. 

Hope: It has to be exhausting. 

Emma Faye: It’s exhausting to try to look neat and use your cues, and so, all day, and then, I would still miss so much, I would have to take home textbooks and reteach myself at school, so everybody else maybe took an hour to do homework or whatever, and me it was taking like 5 hours.

So, it was just an extremely difficult time, just believing that I was smart enough, that I struggled so much more than my friends. I really struggled with depression. From an early age, um, now that I know, kind of, more about mental health, did the [00:18:00] doctors say that my depression, a clinical major depression, started when I was probably 11 years old.

Hope: Wow. 

Emma Faye: Which is pretty upsetting, I think, that you have a child experiencing that much mental health struggles. 

Hope: That was going to be my next question because I was thinking when you were talking about that. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. That has to take a toll on you mentally, so what kind of support did you get, like, and what kind of support do y’all offer that kind of support to with Aid to the Silent, like the mental health aspect of it?

Emma Faye: Yeah, it is something that is a really important thing among all deaf children, and there isn’t hardly any resources out there for this. So constantly, I’m looking for partnerships with organizations, um, there’s a few here in San Antonio that we’ve met with, and there’s a few that are very willing, to the point, a very well known organization for mental health that has counselors.[00:19:00] 

They have a woman that’s so passionate that she’s actually going to school right now to become like a certified interpreter. 

Hope: Oh wow. 

Emma Faye: So, I think there’s a movement happening, but the big school in D. C., they now have a degree for deaf people to become counselors, and, but you know, anyone who’s deaf can go to any type of counseling and hire an interpreter, and that, that practice would have to.

For me, how it started happening was. I mean, I think, I know it started when I was really young, but when I started noticing it was probably around the time of being 18, that’s when I noticed how bad it was. And it would get to the point I couldn’t leave my bed. And a lot of it was related to my hearing.

So, I would just be so exhausted. I really didn’t want to try. Or, I would have another big hearing drop and just be so depressed. And it was really taking a toll on me. And [00:20:00] it would last so long, too. So, my senior year of high school was when we I think it finally was, to the point, I think Emily started getting involved.

Yeah. But it was going on probably from July all the way to January. So it’s very, it was very calendar, like every year on my time frame, it was happening to me, and I decided to get out of bed, I thought, you know, that out of body experience, you know, in the room kind of thing was going on, but every year I was like, okay, it would be better this year, you know, this year, I’m gonna join a Bible study, I’m going to develop a better habit, or I’m going to try a new makeup.

But then this, you know, 2019, it reached to the point I was having panic attacks every single day, like five times a day. For three months straight. 

And so I had to, you know, Which is very vulnerable, but I’m pretty open to talk about it, but, oh, maybe [00:21:00] it was 2018. No, it was 2018, so two years ago, I was going through this.

So, panic attacks all the time, and 

Hope: Not related to the depression? 

Emma Faye: It’s all related. 

Hope: Yeah. 

Emma Faye: So, I had anxiety and depression without knowing what was going on. And so It was to the point that one night, it was so out of control that I was driving and completely lost sense of where I was. I had no idea where I ended up.

I somehow drove myself to the hospital. I thought something was wrong with me. Because when you have a panic attack, sometimes you literally think you’re dying like you have a heart attack. And so I somehow drove myself to the hospital, lost my car. I have no idea if I, I left my car on the street.

Come to find out later. Like how? 

People have no idea how bad it was. 

Hope: Yeah. 

Emma Faye: I got help. I went to a counselor, then [00:22:00] I went to a doctor, and then I was so determined to get better that I practiced every single thing you suggested. Immediately, I got the medication. And the medicine, I mean, it’s not like this for everybody.

Yeah. But for me, it was a week in. I was so happy. Having a significant improvement. That quick. Wasn’t it amazing? Because back then, it’s like a month. Yeah. I felt such a difference and so much relief. Um, pretty instant. And then, so one of the biggest examples I can give is that a lot of my depression and anxiety attacks came from kind of what I talked about in the beginning, a missed relational connection.

So when I would dig deeper into that why I had one, it always had to do with someone in a coffee shop, or someone at work, someone out and about was trying to talk [00:23:00] to me, and I either pretended to be disinterested and move or, I pretended to understand and really didn’t have a connection. 

Hope: Mm hmm. 

Emma Faye: You kind of brush it off.

Hope: Right. 

Emma Faye: Or just look at them like, what, why are you talking to me, but really it’s because it’s a hearer. A hearer, right. So that was where the panic attacks first pointed back to, that I was being someone I’m not. Yeah. Which was interested in not connecting. And so the counselor recommended, catch that habit in the moment and correct it.

Mm hmm. You know, do what you used to do with it to explain your hearing loss and use it as a teaching point to teach them about your hearing loss. So, we got to the point that I would have to literally address it in that moment, and several times I would have that happen, but I would ignore someone, appear rude, I couldn’t hear, I would get in my car, and then realize what happened, and then make myself go [00:24:00] back in.

Hope: Oh, wow. 

Emma Faye: Yes. However, but it worked. I sat with them again. And I would tell them, I’m sorry I appeared rude, your life matters to me, what you said matters, I know she’s deaf, can you say it again? And then I would have to go through all of that several times. And then it became normal again to tell people, yeah, I’m hearing loss, yeah, I can’t hear you, can you write that out for me, can you type it in your phone, can you try saying it again?

So, just that combination of things. With life changing. I’ve been better since then. That’s awesome. I feel like the first year I’ve not gone back into that depression and I’ve stayed pretty level Really healthy, but yeah, a lot of it has to do with hearing loss So, what we do with teenagers, we have a monthly, uh, weekly [00:25:00] teen group that meets, and we talk all about our stories, and our pain loss, and we do things and activities through an organization called YoungLive.

Yeah! And we have Deaf YoungLive. 

Hope: How cool! 

Emma Faye: It’s just so fun. But that’s helped a lot, I think, with the teens and the men in the crowd, just having that group. 

Hope: Yeah. Well, and I imagine, I mean, just thinking when you’re a teenager, I mean, you have zero perspective on life, right? Like everything’s a big deal. So I can imagine how much that mindset, that depression really affects those kids as teenagers.

And then they’re just carrying like you, I mean, you just carried it with you out of your teenage years because there was nothing to address it. 

Emma Faye: Yeah. 

So it’s just critical, because I love when I know that I am a whole and healthy person. Because there’s so many things I’m doing now in my life that I’ve taken on, um, the way I am the executive [00:26:00] director and grant writer, funder. [unintelligible] Hands on. Mm-Hmm. Student, all these different things, right? I’m complete focus on this and I’m in my first serious relationship the first time I’m in such different place because I wasn’t easy, right? And I did uncomfortable things totally because. And that’s kind of where people have to arrive to. With mental health is, you have to arrive to that nobody else can make you get help.

And so, the moment I decided to get help, and I actually put to practice what professionals were saying, I mean, that changed my life forever. 

Hope: Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing. And how do you, where do you see Aid to the Silent going? Like, what are your future plans for the organization? 

Emma Faye: It’s growing so fast that [00:27:00] I keep putting a timeline, like, Okay, five years, we’ll do this.

And then it happens a lot sooner. So 

Hope: Awesome, though! 

Emma Faye: Yeah, it’s just so cool. I’m like, okay. It’s gone. I’ll keep going. Right, right. It’s wonderful, but one of the big goals is that we are going to start a capital campaign for headquarters for facilities because we do not have a solid place for a team for kids to come gather.

So a lot of what we need to set up is an audiological center so that kids can come in and be tested on site and to have speech therapy rooms, to have ASL community classes there, to have a deaf in line team group there, to have all the offices there. We have parent teacher conferences, so there’s so much that we wanted to do, but we really don’t have the space to do it, so that’s the big vision, is that we would [00:28:00] really become a deaf youth, deaf children’s center.

Yeah. Everybody can come in after school, we can have tutors there and mentors, we can have the, the therapist and the sign language teachers there with the families. So that’s kind of the big vision for that, and it’s to be able to help them that way. 

Hope: And are y’all doing that through fundraising? Like, how will you do that?

Emma Faye: A lot of it is It’s finding your top tier donors and meeting your partners in that way, and then it’s also grant writing with people in the community, so that’s kind of how it works, but the resource portion, just funding hearing aids and classroom equipment, all of that, that is a constant cost that Any of those resources can cost them like 2, 000 to 5, 000 per resource, and so we really need [00:29:00] support in that way because each time someone partners with us financially or with their talents, with their time, that’s often a very tangible, real way for a particular deaf child.

Right. So, so many of them, I mean, we have folders and folders of their names, their pictures, their images. So hearing loss history, so that’s where it comes in with the community, is knowing that these are children, a lot of them here. And I’m in the city of San Antonio that needs support, um, because that’s that one thing that’s going to change the pivot of their lives.

Right. The resources and having equal access to education changes everything for them. 

Hope: For sure. So when you were in school, were you, like, in mainstream classrooms? Do you have any sort of, like, accommodations? 

Emma Faye: I’m from a small town and I went to a private school. But I had absolutely nothing apart from [00:30:00] Like, my parents have the, um 

Hope: That’s insane.

That’s insane. Insane. You were, like, you were amazing. 

Emma Faye: I don’t know how I did it. I don’t think either of that, it was survival. It was survival, it was 

You have to. So I have no other option. And I love my school, it wasn’t perfect. Work Me was just Right. Not a world thankful, but I very limited choices other than what my parents had to, you save up for 

Hope: Mm-Hmm.

Emma Faye: for themselves to advocate for me. Right. Right. So I had several, you know, hearing aids, you have to change hearing aids all through that going up. But they have to constantly do pay out of pocket and figure out how to finance it and do payments. Right. So, it’s just, it’s just a different world. I think, I’m so [00:31:00] grateful that I’ve experienced a lot of injustices and a lot of, you know, I’m in a tough situation, but I’m willing to be an advocate because now I’m able to do that.

They’re so wonderful. Yeah, I mean. I’m that patient. Yeah, so I think a lot of people may just credit that, oh, her life had been put together, and they don’t realize how much I have to fight through the system, and how much I struggle with mental health. So it looks so beautiful, of course, on Instagram, with my story, but nobody’s seen it.

A lot of times people don’t give me the benefit of doubt of, wow, this girl actually went through it. Yeah. Coming out the other side. So, I think it’s important that when you look at someone’s life, you remember that they are looking this way now because they probably went through so much. 

Hope: Exactly, exactly.

I would, there was something the other day that I saw on Instagram and it was saying basically that is, Is you see, you know, it was [00:32:00] talking about businesses, but same thing, you’re going through hardships and you don’t see the journey of the struggle to get to this, you know, big thriving business. It’s the same, right?

With your personal journey. I mean, you’ve got this amazing foundation and this incredible testimony to tell, but you’ve got the struggle that led up to this point. I mean,

Emma Faye: But people don’t realize that I still have to fight, not only for so many other people, but for myself, too. And a lot of times, I’m the one that’s the first one in to a situation. So, whether it’s talking with the church, or a conference, or a technology thing I have to be the first deaf person that’s like, excuse me but I tried to attend, I tried to use your service.

Right. I can’t access it, your captions weren’t accurate or whatever. Yeah. So, and then it’s like, I paved the way. Right. That I’m the first one that had to do the hard stuff. [00:33:00] Right. Yeah. But it’s a good thing to be. It’s a hard thing that’s worth it. So. 

Hope: Yes. Yeah. 

Yeah. Well, and it takes, I think it takes a certain person to be able to.

Use that as a like source of empowerment rather than, you know, something to hold you back So I think that I mean it speaks to your character for sure. 

Emma Faye: Oh Thank you 

Hope: Yeah, well, so where can people find out more about about your organization and how can they help 

Emma Faye: so it’s aid the silent. com And everything that you see from contact us to application that literally comes to my email browser and many other people around me that we very much also hand on from beginning to end.

But we have several events throughout the year such as a 5k, we have a big fundraising gala, we have deaf awareness events. We have, um, community events, so constantly needing [00:34:00] volunteers, people to, um, donate sometimes at school supplies or books, something very practical, and everybody on any type of level can get involved in.

And then we constantly are looking for qualified ASL teachers, we’re looking for speech therapists, We’re looking for tech people, people that can caption, that know A B, so those are the kind of things I call talent. And then treasure is people getting from their heart as if they felt compelled to be a part of a child’s journey, and truly what’s coming in from people, it goes back to that child.

You know, through that direct line of impact. Right. And then. Another way is the time, so that’s the volunteering at a event. That’s even, we’ve had some people come and just bring us breakfast, and I’m like, that’s the greatest thing ever! [00:35:00] We got fed to do what we’re doing. 

Hope: Right, right. 

Emma Faye: So, me little tiny thing, it means, it makes a huge world of difference for us.

Hope: Yeah, and how, we were talking earlier, there’s some opportunities for people now, while we’re all stuck in home and looking for things to do. How can people kind of get involved in the deaf community right now? 

Emma Faye: So that, it’s cool to watch what’s happening that’s positive from something so terrible, but I’m trying to really focus on some good things.

But the hub of deaf education is a university called Gallaudet in Washington, D. C. And it’s very hard to get into classes, especially even online. So right now they’re actually offering free ASL lessons on Gallaudet University. So it’s called ASL Connect. Do free lesson plans about your basic signs and Your alphabet, things like that, that’s super helpful because you [00:36:00] will be surprised that once you start having the awareness of the deaf community, you start to see them, you start to hear about it, and you want to be able to use your alphabet and basic signs.

And then another way to help is that what’s happening is lower economic school districts everywhere, they can’t afford the technology for their students because their students may not have internet. Or a technology to access online schooling. So they’re gonna be very struggling right now. And a lot of the materials aren’t captioned.

They’re not interpreted. So teachers at the desk are having to scramble and figure out what to do instead. And so it’s very important that the materials people are putting out there, that they’re making the effort to caption them. But they’re making the effort to interpret it. Because that means, The deaf children or deaf people right now all this creativity is happening all this entertainment But it’s not being accessible So that’s the [00:37:00] biggest tragedy, is that it’s not equal access for everybody right now.

Hope: Yeah, yeah. Those are great opportunities, though. I mean, I feel like everyone should, I mean, if we’re not doing anything, why not do something that makes a difference while we’re at home, right? 

Emma Faye: Yeah, so if you take whatever you’re making for the day and add the captions, add the interpreter, and get them out, it really is helpful.

There’s a company that I use here called CaptionSource. There’s a national company called web. com, that’s i e b dot com. And all you do is send them a video, and I think it’s like a, maybe a dollar a minute or something. They will capture it for you. So there’s, there’s a lot of, uh, resources out there that people just don’t know about.

Even me and my service dog, I don’t show him, he’s asleep. But I have a service dog named Hank, and he’s my hearing dog. So we’re doing these cute little, I have a picture. Yeah. This is [00:38:00] Hank. 

Hope: Oh my gosh. 

Emma Faye: He’s a Black lab. He’s adorable. 

Hope: Oh my gosh. So awesome. 

Emma Faye: He and I have signing and reading time online. 

Hope: Aww. That’s so cute. 

Emma Faye: So you’re seeing so much creativity happen. 

Hope: Yeah. That’s so great. Yeah, that’s so great. So I like to always finish with the same question for everyone. It’s really interesting to get everybody’s response. I feel like they’re all different, but then all the same, like all at the same time. So my question is, what do you think is the most important change people can make or the most important thing they can do to live with purpose?

Emma Faye: To live with purpose? I think you have to tap into the hard parts of your story to see how it’s going to be So good. So, one of my favorite things is God uses your deepest pain as a launchpad for your greatest calling. The purpose in your life is tapping into the places you [00:39:00] may not want to tap into, but that’s gonna bring ultimate healing to you, which can be used for ultimate healing of other people.

Hope: That is perfect. I love that. 

Emma Faye: Thank you for this. 

Hope: Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for giving some of your time. This is just Completely inspirational. So I know people are going to be interested to learn more and get involved in the Deaf community. I think this is so fantastic. 

Emma Faye: Thank you. 

Hope: Yes, thank you. Thanks for listening to Hopeful and Wholesome y’all.

If you found value in this week’s episode, please subscribe on iTunes, wherever you get your podcast, and leave review to let me know what you thought. I’d love to know what you find useful in these episodes so I know how I can provide the most value I can to my listeners. And if you have topics that you wanna know more about, I’d love to hear those as well.

So shoot me a message on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. It’s at the Hope razza, or visit my website, hope and wholesome com. Thanks y’all. 

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