Seattle Regarded As Most-Livable City Among Deaf-Blind People

If you can't see the numbers and you can't hear the bus driver's directions, how do you know what bus to get on?

Seattle's deaf-blind community came up with an answer - a deck of cards printed with numbers in large type and braille. Riders hold them up for the driver to see which bus they want.

The solution came from the Deaf-Blind Community Service Center and its deaf-blind staff.

"My work is to help empower deaf-blind people," says center case manager Mark Landreneau, a Los Angeles transplant with a degree in business. "I don't complain for them, I teach them how to complain for themselves."

Seattle has a name as a deaf-blind Mecca.

"There are five times as many deaf-blind people in L.A. as there are in Seattle," says Landreneau. "But there are no services. If I'd picked any other city in any other state, I wouldn't have been able to grow in the ways I've been able to here."

Landreneau says the deaf-blind come here because they can do things that can't do anywhere else.

For example there's Danny Delcambere, a cook who has Ushers Syndrome. Ushers is a genetic disorder that causes deafness and gradual blindness.

Delcambere is a Louisiana transplant to Seattle. A scholarship paid for his interpreter and support services during an internship in New Orleans with the cajun chef Paul Prudhomme. "That never would have happened in Los Angeles," says Landreneau.

"He wants to set up a small restaurant when he gets back to

Seattle. He says the Cajun food here is nothing like it should be."

Maria Garden knows of at least 200 deaf-blind people who have moved here since she arrived four years ago. She's a graduate of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the nation's only college for the deaf.

Garden, 28, is deaf and going blind from Ushers. She and her deaf husband have a 6-month-old son.

Like hundreds of deaf-blind people from across the country, she found work and a vibrant community in Seattle.

Garden oversees a federal grant to teach the deaf-blind independent living skills at the Lighthouse for the Blind.

"Right now we're working on bank machines," Garden says, using sign language. "When you can't see or hear the machine, you have to memorize all the possible menus in the right order. So we made up a braille card that replicates the screen."

Theresa Smith, director of the American Sign Language School of Seattle, says the support services exist because of the strength and scrappiness of Seattle's deaf-blind community.

Washington State Deaf-Blind Citizens was formally incorporated in 1982 and two years later the American Association of the Deaf-Blind held its annual convention in Seattle. More than 400 visitors from all 50 states saw what an active group of deaf-blind people could accomplish, Smith says.

Seattle's reputation draws people here.

Dan Mansfield is one of those movers and shakers. A founder and member of several deaf-blind organizations, he now sits on the Governor's Committee on Disability Issues and Employment.

A two-month bus trip around the United States convinced him Seattle was where he wanted to settle. The trip was a college graduation present from his parents. Once he got here, he spent a year looking for a job.

That tenacity paid off. Mansfield, 42, found work as a word processor at Pacific Northwest Bell, which would become US West. He has Ushers Syndrome, and after 12 years, his eyesight began to deteriorate.

His boss was under pressure to give him a pink slip, but Mansfield pushed for another chance.

His boss backed him, and they went all the way to Bell president Andrew Smith. Smith called together company vice presidents and told them to find Mansfield a job.

They said it was impossible, but Mansfield didn't give up. Finally the company created a position of customer-services representative for the deaf, a position Mansfield has held for six years.

One of the most popular activities of the year in the community is a two week deaf-blind summer camp at Seabeck Center near Bremerton. The Lighthouse for the Blind, which employs 40 deaf-blind workers, has organized it since 1978.

At camp, poles and ropes lead from one building to the other, allowing deaf-blind people to roam the grounds without a guide. Knots in front of buildings serve as "signs." Seven knots on the rope means you're in front of cabin seven.

Campers go canoeing, horseback riding, ride tandem bikes and learn country-western dancing.

Half the people who attend the camp are from out of state. Paula Hoffman of the Lighthouse says many of them end up moving here.

"People come from other places where there's no support, no chance to be with other deaf-blind people," she says. "It's like a different world here."