KASAMA, Zambia (AP) — Every morning, Bridget Chanda places her prosthetic legs beside her bed, pulls on her stockings and pushes the remains of her limbs into the prosthetics as best she can. After six years they no longer fit, and it’s painful to stand or walk for too long, but it doesn’t faze her much.“I still manage somehow,” she said. “I am a girl on a mission.”Chanda, 18, is intent on helping educate Zambia’s deaf community about climate change. As the southern African nation has suffered from more frequent extreme weather, including its current severe drought, it’s prompted the Zambian government to include more climate change education in its school curriculum.But for that to be shared with the deaf community, it’s up to people like Chanda to help translate — and it’s a task that is more difficult because sign language doesn’t include many climate-related terms.She’s a student at Chileshe Chepela Special School in Kasama, in northern Zambia, where many students are deaf or hard of hearing. After Chanda enrolled there in 2022, learning sign language was a way to fit in and bond with those schoolmates, even though she herself is not deaf. Around the same time, climate change was becoming a more topical issue in the country, and Chanda — who finds it puzzling that her hometown in the south near Lusaka has been wracked by drought while Kasama is looking at a bumper harvest — wanted to talk about it.“Climate change affects our way of life,” she said.The country has been suffering from severe food shortages as water has grown scarce, prompting the president to declare a nation …
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnKASAMA, Zambia (AP) — Every morning, Bridget Chanda places her prosthetic legs beside her bed, pulls on her stockings and pushes the remains of her limbs into the prosthetics as best she can. After six years they no longer fit, and it’s painful to stand or walk for too long, but it doesn’t faze her much.“I still manage somehow,” she said. “I am a girl on a mission.”Chanda, 18, is intent on helping educate Zambia’s deaf community about climate change. As the southern African nation has suffered from more frequent extreme weather, including its current severe drought, it’s prompted the Zambian government to include more climate change education in its school curriculum.But for that to be shared with the deaf community, it’s up to people like Chanda to help translate — and it’s a task that is more difficult because sign language doesn’t include many climate-related terms.She’s a student at Chileshe Chepela Special School in Kasama, in northern Zambia, where many students are deaf or hard of hearing. After Chanda enrolled there in 2022, learning sign language was a way to fit in and bond with those schoolmates, even though she herself is not deaf. Around the same time, climate change was becoming a more topical issue in the country, and Chanda — who finds it puzzling that her hometown in the south near Lusaka has been wracked by drought while Kasama is looking at a bumper harvest — wanted to talk about it.“Climate change affects our way of life,” she said.The country has been suffering from severe food shortages as water has grown scarce, prompting the president to declare a nation …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
