Deaf South Asian Americans: Shazia’s First Days

The Disability Visibility Project loves it when people reach out to us and share their projects on disability history. Sarika D. Metha is a Producer for APA Compass on KBOO 90.7 FM, specializing in issues concerning race, ethnicity, and culture. She has a Bilingual/ELL Education, Deaf Studies, Early Intervention, etc. Sarika spent a decade serving linguistic minority communities, internationally in Costa Rica and India and domestically in Chicago, Champaign, SF Bay Area, Washington, DC and now, Portland.

Sarika has been documenting the stories of Deaf South Asian Americans. How cool is that?!?

Here is one story: Shazia’s First Days in America 

July 16, 2013

Shazia Siddiqi is a Deaf Pakistani American doctor, born in Texas area and raised in California. Meeting a deaf doctor is not a common experience, so I asked her to share her medical school tales with me, along with other fun stories from her college years at UC Berkeley.

This is another video in a series of stories I’m collecting, documenting the experiences of the Deaf South Asian American community in Washington, DC. These stories are a part of the permanent collection with the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). While these experiences do not represent the entire community, they certainly offer some insight. We chatted last November, at Gallaudet University’s Linguistics Department.

In this video, Shazia talks about how she became interested in medicine in the first place, but the struggles she faced as a deaf medical student in an international school. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act couldn’t guarantee providing interpreters or real time captioning for her studies, she had to find other creative ways to make it through medical school. Upon beginning her rotations, her father fell sick and was wait-listed for a heart transplant, at which point Shazia put a hold on her own studies to help take care of her family.

The entire post is here:

http://sarikadmehta.com/2013/07/16/deaf-south-asian-americans-shazias-story/

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Sarika D. Mehta

Website: http://sarikadmehta.com

Check out all the videos of Deaf South Asian Americans: http://sarikadmehta.com/category/video/