I got into a cab the other day
and said to the driver where I wanted to go.
The driver asked me,
“Have you just arrived in São Paulo?”
And I answered, “No. I’ve lived here for a long time.”
We went on talking along the way,
and at some point he asked me again,
“But where are you from?”
Then I asked him, “Are you asking me because of my accent?”
And he answered yes.
This was the hook for me to answer this question,
that probably many of you are asking yourselves.
My voice is the result of more than 25 years
without any hearing feedback.
I’m deaf.
But I’m a different kind of deaf person,
not the kind most people know.
You must have already heard about deaf people who use sign languages,
or also about people who start losing hearing because of age
and we start speaking louder when talking to them.
But, between these two groups, there are many kinds of hearing loss,
many forms of communication.
People like me who have a somewhat weird voice,
this group is called oral deaf group.
I’ll briefly tell you my story.
I was born hearing normally.
One day, at the age of nine, I lost my hearing because of mumps.
I lost almost all my hearing,
and then I started communicating through lip reading –
I was excellent at it –
and through my voice,
because up until I was nine I’d already learned to speak, right?
And as time went by I start acquiring this accent
that makes my voice a little weird – but that’s OK.
It’s funny the way people react
when at some point I say
that I’m hearing impaired.
We’ve been talking for half an hour, then the person gathers courage and asks,
“Where is your accent from?”
I explain,
“I’m hearing impaired, I’m deaf.”
Then the person has a really funny reaction.
They stop talking and stare at me.
(Laughter)
Until they suddenly say,
“Oh, my God, how can I talk to you if I don’t know that sign language.”
(Laughter)
Then I breathe deeply, smile, try to be as friendly as I can, and say,
“What if we keep talking the same way we were doing two minutes earlier;
it was working nicely.”
(Laughter)
The funny thing is that I always become Brazilian when I’m abroad.
It’s impressive.
A Brazilian always recognizes another Brazilian speaking English.
I don’t know how, it’s as if we have a big sign on our forehead.
I don’t know if it’s the accent.
One of these days I was in Dublin, visiting my sister who lives there.
I went out to buy coffee,
feeling the perfect tourist with my fantastic English.
I went to the coffee shop and said in English,
“Good morning. I’d like a cappuccino please.”
And the girl answered,
“Brazilian? Let’s talk in Portuguese because I’m also Brazilian.”
(Laughter)
I was in another country, I wasn’t even speaking my language,
and all of a sudden I’m Brazilian.
And here in Brazil, I’m a foreigner all the time.
Because, besides my accent, my real name –
Lak Lobato is an artistic name –
my name is Lakshimi Austregesilo.
Do you think at any moment that I’m a Brazilian?
(Laughter)
Throughout my whole life, my communication has occurred through lip reading.
Before, when I would say, “I do lip reading,”
people would ask me, “What’s this?”
Nowadays, when I say I do lip reading, people ask me,
“Have you ever read the lips of a soccer player on television
to know what they were saying during the game?”
Believe me or not, I’ve done this already.
(Laughter)
I’ve even done the transcription of a whole film of Zé do Caixão,
whose original audio had been lost.
It was really cool.
(Laughter)
Well, these are very special occasions.
They can’t help us to talk about the meaning of communication
through lip reading.
Many people who hear nothing at all, just like me,
use lip reading to communicate.
And, believe me or not,
it’s a natural talent that human beings have.
It’s very common
when you’re talking to somebody, looking at the person,
to understand the person much better than if you’re talking on the phone.
Because on the phone you’re not seeing the person,
and then you start making all those mistakes.
To read lips, there is no secret.
You read the person’s lips, the movements of their lips,
the position and the movement of the tongue,
and the facial expression.
Facial expression is very important
because we can’t get the voice intonation,
so we get it through facial expression.
And to talk to somebody who does lip reading is no big deal.
You talk to the person, preferably looking at them.
Avoid putting your hand in front of the mouth.
Try talking a little slower, but naturally.
This means, don’t talk like me, because I talk really fast.
I’m a good example of what you shouldn’t do.
And if the person doesn’t understand you, they’ll ask you to say it again,
so relax and talk to them normally.
The same holds true if you don’t understand what an oral deaf says,
because our voice is weird.
Ask them to repeat.
The worst thing that can happen is the person will say it again.
Nothing more.
I’ve never worn hearing aids
because my hearing loss is really very profound.
I have no residual hearing to be used to amplify sound.
That’s what hearing aids do,
they amplify sound as if the person has a speaker in their ear.
But, for those who have less hearing loss than me
they can have great results.
If the person gets used to it, of course,
because it’s not like the person puts on the hearing aid
and starts hearing perfectly.
You have to get used to hearing with it.
My husband’s grandfather is 98 years old.
He is super active and at one with life.
When he was about 90 he started losing his hearing.
And then he needed a hearing aid
to talk to his family, you know?
And I remember that we arrived at his home
and his hearing aid was in his pocket.
I said to him, “Grandpa, why is your hearing aid on your pocket?
A hearing aid is to be worn on the ear.”
He then looked at me with that understanding
that only a hearing impaired has with another,
because only a hearing impaired would understand.
I said, “Grandpa, I understand that you can’t wear the hearing aid
because of the noise,”
because he said it was noisy.
“But you have to get used to it,
so that you can understand what we are saying.”
Over time he tried many devices and got used to it,
and now he wears it all the time, even more than I do.
As, in my case, the loss is very profound,
a hearing aid wouldn’t be a solution for me.
So I used to communicate through lip reading, and it was OK.
My will to communicate was much greater
than any other obstacle imposed by deafness.
But I have to confess that I felt a great desire to hear,
because sound is what connects us with the world around us.
Sound creates our sense of community.
The language we speak is what connects us.
And I missed all these things.
I missed being part of this universe of sounds
in which we live every day.
So I tried to find a more advanced technology,
more powerful than the usual hearing aids,
called cochlear implant.
The cochlear implant has two parts.
One part is implanted internally through surgery.
The other part is external
and captures the sound of the environment and sends it to the internal part.
The internal part is made up of electronic components
which conduct the sound to a region of the ear called the cochlea.
These sounds stimulate it electronically and send the sound to the brain,
which then interprets what we hear.
I call these components “sonorous stars.”
That’s just my thing.
The external part may be removed at our convenience.
We can place it and remove it.
The correct is to wear it all the time
and remove it only to sleep or to take a bath.
But I confess to you that I remove it when there’s some noise that bothers me.
For example, at the final of a championship
when people set off those endless fireworks.
Or at work, when I need to focus on something
and people start talking about the last chapter
of the series everybody is watching.
Then I say, “Guys, I’ll have to remove it.”
But I love using the implant
so I tell everybody that I wear it all the time,
although sometimes I remove it.
The real truth is that a cochlear implant result varies a lot.
In my case, I have the best expected outcome of the implant,
so I can talk on the phone, hear music.
But this varies a lot from person to person,
because it depends on the person’s history,
the type of deafness.
What helped in my case was the fact that I’d heard before,
that I had a hearing memory.
But it also presents good results for people with progressive loss,
or people who have always worn hearing aids.
Children, when implanted early,
have very good results.
In many cases, they can have the speech acquisition,
language development and hearing comprehension
of a child the same age who hears normally.
But, of course, at their own pace.
We can’t compare a child who was born hearing
with a child with a cochlear implantation.
I have a goddaughter with an implant who is almost three years old,
and she was implanted at 11 months.
And the results for her took some time.
She could understand what we were saying but she wouldn’t say anything.
She had her own way to communicate but she wouldn’t talk.
One day we all went to the beach together.
She saw the sea for the first time, and we said to her,
“Look, Lara, water.”
Then she repeated, “Water. Water. Water.”
She said 150,000 times the word “water.”
But the most amazing thing
was she not only understood and repeated the sound,
she understood the concept of the word water.
Suddenly, water was the sea,
but it was also the pool at the hotel where she loved to stay.
It was also the content of the bottle used to prepare her milk.
More than just repeating a sound,
she was beginning to understand the world around her,
because that’s the most special thing about the cochlear implant:
it connects us with the world around us.
In my case,
after more than 20 years without hearing,
when I heard again,
I became enchanted with the silliest routine sounds.
Why?
Because hearing again, for me, was like returning back home
after a long trip, to a far, far away country
where I’d gone against my will.
And do you know what is the feeling of returning home after a long time?
Everything that you took for granted becomes extremely interesting.
I remember that I was enchanted with the silliest routine sounds,
like the tick-tock of the clock.
I’d find it fascinating to hear the “tick, tick, tick,” marking the time.
I’d say, “This is fascinating.”
After so many years without hearing music,
can you imagine what it was like the first time I heard music?
Can you imagine this feeling of hearing music after 25 years?
Especially for me as I am an extremely auditory person.
I remember that I chose a well-known song,
because I wanted to be able to sing along
and I didn’t know if I’d understand the lyrics.
Then I put on my headphones connected to my device,
and the music started to play
and I started singing softly the music in my mind.
I went on, singing it mentally, but then something weird happened.
The music went on playing
and the rhythm was much better than I was able to imagine it.
Then it came to a point when I didn’t know the music, so I said,
“Hey, I’m not imagining the music, I’m hearing it.”
And I had a physical reaction.
I remember feeling my chest tightening and my body freezing.
Suddenly I felt a heat wave and started to cry out so loud
that I couldn’t hear the music anymore.
(Laughter)
And my heart started beating so fast that I thought,
“Oh my God, I’ll have a heart attack; but everything is OK, I’ll die happy
because I’m hearing music.”
Not only were those fascinating sounds of daily life,
but everything else that had gained sound during those 25 years of not hearing.
I remember when I would go to the mall in the 80s.
You’d arrive at the mall, park your car and go for a stroll.
Now it’s different.
When you arrive at the mall,
there’s a gate to let you in the parking lot,
a machine that gives you a ticket, and then you enter the parking lot.
Folks, the machine talks to you, have you noticed that?
(Laughter)
I remember the first time the machine talked to me.
I went to take the ticket from the machine and it said,
“Welcome to the mall. Press the button and take your card.”
The machine even did poetry.
And then I didn’t know if I had to answer.
“Should I talk to it?” (Laughter)
The next time I took the card out
I already knew that I didn’t need to talk to it, but I thought,
“Will it get upset if I just ignore it?”
(Laughter)
Later I learned that it wouldn’t. Machines don’t care, they’re fine.
But people do care.
Every person wants to get attention.
They want to be part of the group.
They want to be able to communicate.
It doesn’t matter the language they speak,
or the means of communication they use;
everybody wants to communicate.
Because each one of us has a lot to say,
and even more to listen.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)
”
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