This summer in Hong Kong a Deaf Dialogue Seminar will be held on ways to build a better society in Asia.

The preliminary training session for the seminar was recently conducted at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with young deaf people from various countries discussing a wide range of topics, including human rights for the deaf, personnel training for leaders, and their roles as leaders.

A seminar in progress

The Deaf Dialogue grew out of the BABA Retreat conference first held by The Nippon Foundation in 2006 and the Blind Dialogue held in July 2008, where ussues such as war, poverty, and human rights violations in Asian nations were discussed with the goal of improving leadership training and building networks for future activities.

The goal of the December training session, similarly, was to provide deaf young Asian people with leadership skills and a global outlook, to create a vision of a broader Asian community, and to promote joint efforts by building a network of deaf people throughout Asia. It was attended by outstanding deaf people who had previously received Nippon Foundation support.

The preliminary training session was intended to establish a common base upon which participants will then be able to build at the main seminar. It was organized by The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and jointly supported by The Nippon Foundation and the "World Federation of the Deaf Regional Secretariat for Asia and the Pacific" (WFD RS A/P).

It was attended by 19 participants from Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

Presentations were translated into the sign language of each country.

Makoto Ikegami, who also studied at Gallaudet University under the Nippon Foundation program, described the significance of the training. "Promoting participation in society by the deaf in developing nations requires more than mere financial support, he noted, adding that he expects other forms of international contribution like the deployment of experienced personnel to become ever more important. Megumi Kawakami, another Gallaudet grad, commented on how keenly the event made her aware of the large differences between Japan and other Asian countries in education and sign language translations programs for the deaf. She emphasized the importance of such forums for information-exchange and discussion and expressed her hopes to learn from the leadership of the instructors and to make use of these skills.