Last week, Jen and I had the privilege of visiting our nation’s capital. We were mostly there on business—but we made sure to do some sightseeing, too. We stayed with a family in Virginia that used to go to my church. I had a great time with them and look forward to doing it again some time.
We attended the National Outreach Conference at Gallaudet University which included a day at Maryland School for the Deaf. This was an interesting experience. It was not the perfect fit for us, and we were immediately deemed the “green horns” of the group, but we learned a lot. Since I have no knowledge of how deaf education works in the states, it was enlightening to find out the strengths and weaknesses of schools around the country. We found that even though we are a small Christian school in Puerto Rico, we share some of the same struggles as the state schools for the deaf. Also, the conference provided many opportunities for us to take in new ASL vocabulary.
And that was all the work we were going to do on this trip—or so we thought. Right before we flew in, the family we were staying with informed us that there was a conference for the deaf at a church right by their house. They asked if we were attending—we hadn’t planned on it, but we couldn’t resist. The conference was taking place the week we were there, and it was a Christian conference. This was more up our alley than the first one.
We planned to go for only one day. Jen and I chose to attend two workshops about ASL skills development, but the teacher gave a preview for the following day’s class about ASL phrases. We knew we had to be there for that, so we delayed our sightseeing plans. We’re glad we did; we learned a lot of useful vocabulary. Hopefully, I’ll be able to impress my students with my new signs this August.
Now to the fun part…sightseeing! Even though I’ve been to Washington D.C. many times, I’ve never gone at an age where I appreciated the history and museums. This time, I felt like a kid in an amusement park. We spent two days traveling all around the city—joined by my college roommate Sam. We covered a lot of ground: National Postal Museum, National Art Gallery, International Spy Museum, Ford's Theatre, American History Museum, Air and Space Museum, Arlington National Cemetery, Old Post Office, and most of the monuments—Washington, Lincoln, World War Two, Vietnam War, Korean War, Jefferson, FDR, and we were able to see the Martin Luther King Jr. monument that is still being built!
We had a great trip. Our feet hurt, our brains hurt, but our faces were smiling the whole time.
Next stop...
