by Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Mar 11/98) - Until Edmonton Eskimo Jed Roberts was three years old, his mother thought he was mentally retarded.

Unable to speak, he was given tests that showed he had a hearing impairment.

"I didn't want to wear my hearing aid because I worried about what girls thought," the 30-year-old father said in Yellowknife last week. "I didn't want to look like a geek. Now I realize how silly that is."

Because Roberts still remembers discouraging words from his own parents, he has advice for other parents.

"If you tell a child he can't do something, that can be pretty devastating. I was wanting to prove people wrong, but I could have easily given up," he says, wearing hearing aides in both ears.

Roberts spent much of the weekend at a NWT-wide conference for people with disabilities, organized to give support to those with hearing disabilities and their care-givers.

The slogan was "20/20" to both mark a 20th anniversary and a point from which to look 20 years into the future.

Ten-year-old Yellowknifer Clayton Ungungai, who shares Roberts' congenital hearing impairment, was on a family outing and did not get to meet Roberts

But then, Ungungai is not into football. The Grade 5 student but prefers swimming and individual pursuits, his mother Sandy says.

"He says he is comfortable being deaf," says Sandy, interpreting her son's American Sign Language.

"He's met people who are deaf and working and he's amazed," Sandy says. "There was one woman whom he asked what she did and she said she worked for the GNWT and has children."

When it comes to Clayton's own future, he is less certain. In fact, he wordlessly shrugs and points to his head as though to say that he can not think of anything.

Sandy and Clayton both attend a program at Stanton Regional Hospital's audiology department to study American Sign Language.

Though Clayton has practised the popular language for five years, before that, he and Sandy made up their own signs.

"It's intimidating," Sandy says, flipping through an ASL text book. "We didn't know how to go about getting a sign language book."

Clayton now has a part-time teaching aide fluent in sign language. Though it is only for half the time, it is better than trying to lip read and understand only about 30 per cent of the content.

Despite Clayton's relative contentment, Lydia Bardak, executive director of the NWT Council for Disabled Persons says things could be a lot better for people like Clayton.

"Even if a deaf person is going to the doctor or into the hospital for treatment, there're no sign language interpreters in Yellowknife."

On the other hand, Bardak said, 10 years ago, deaf children were sent to far-flung communities in the South for schooling.