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knows. Pictured from left is Cozad, Lisa Benner of Charlotte, Donna Carpenter of Kannapolis, Keith Allison of Kannapolis, Debbie Foster of Concord and Bill Ross ofConcord. Mark Owtntby pHotOHANDPRINTS — This group formed to minister to the deaf appears before hearing and deaf audiences. In fact most of their audiences are hearing. Cindy Cozad, left, says sign lanuage is the most beautiful language sheHandprints: A group administering to deafBy DENISE PRIVETTE Staff WriterThree years ago when Lisa Benner and Cindy Cozad left home for weekends interpreting Christian festivals for the deaf, they came back frustrated.“The deaf were not coming,” remembered Benner, who is employed as an interpreter for deaf students in hearing classrooms in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. “I talked to the head of the Sun Festival (in Myrtle Beach) and told him, ‘We’ve got to do more than interpret and actually minister straight to them.’ ”The director took her advice and asked Benner to come up with a Christian ministry targeted to a deaf audience. In response, a group called “Handprints” was created by Benner and friends including Cozad. who teaches sign language at Rowan Technical College and Bill Ross of Concord, who lost most of his ability to hear because of a childhood illness.The threesome premiered with four others at the Discovery Festival in Brevard, and were booked by three churches after the performance. Benner, Ross and Cozad remain in Handprints, which now has four performers from Cabarrus and Mecklenburg Counties.The creation served its purpose. In 1983,21 deaf people attended the Sun Festival which was attended this year by 50 deaf. Since the assemblage of seven people who have a personal interest in a deaf ministry, the group has appeared before a New Year’s Eve service at Oven’s Auditorium in Charlotte and on the main stage at the Mecklenburg County Fair.Handprints combine puppetry, music and mime into skits and songs with inspirational and Christian messages. Last week at the Saturday Church School sponsored by the Association of Retarded Citizens of Cabarrus County at Kimball Memorial Lutheran Church, there wasn’t a deaf person in the audience.But something in the motion of signs that said words nobody understood had significance, as about 30 at-tenders, some bused over from group homes in the county for the mentally handicapped, watched with eyes fixed to the small stage in the Kimball fellowship room.“It’s probably one of the most beautiful languages I know,” Cozad later said. When I get to heaven, I know everyone is going to be hearing, but I don’t think we’ll give it up.”Through mime, narration and signs, Benner told a cutesy story about birds, puppetiered by Ross, Donna Carpenter, Keith Allison, Debbie Foster and Carol Braf-ford. The birds were attracted to her window by religious music and distracted as soon as the music stopped.The bird-drawing tunes were provided by a phonograph, mimed by Cozad, who turned an arm into a relentlessly reliable needle, which was tugged up and down by Benner to check out the singing bird theory.The purpose of the Handprints is two-fold — to relay a Christian message to deaf persons and to educate the hearing that deaf people are “extremely capable people who just can’t hear.”Ross, a medical technologist at Cabarrus Memorial Hospital, is the group's best testimonial. Considered orally deaf, he lost most of his ability to hear as a child because of illness. His parents paid for expensive classes where he learned to read lips. He didn’t learn sign language until his twenties.Ross was encouraged to pursue his interest in medicine as a technologist by a ministerial student and by a professor of microbiology at Georgetown College, the Baptist school in Kentucky he attended.Ross said he conducts workshops which help the deaf understand Biblical metaphors which many times are unfamiliar because their language is used more utilitananly.Each member of the group has a story of their involvement in ministry for the deaf. Foster and Carpenter were in sign classes Cozad teaches as was Allison, who first learned to sign in classes at Fayetteville Technical College while he was in the army.Cozad learned to sign years ago before community colleges and technical colleges offered the course. The church she attended, McGill Avenue Baptist, needed an interpreter, she learned to sign and filled the job.Benner, an Arizona native, says three things could have encouraged her to become involved in “deaf culture,” which she says few people know exists. Her brother suffered ear damage while serving in the U.S. Army. She understood more of what it felt to be a minority after teaching in a Navajo Indian reservation.When she moved to Charlotte from Arizona, Benner first worked as a desk supervisor at a department store and was unable to help a deaf customer because she didn’t understand her language.“I thought. Why should that lady have to learn my language — It’s not her fault she’s deaf? ”So Benner learned and now interprets for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system.For Cozad, that kind of learning is one of the gratifying features of the volunteer ministry She said a friend who registered for sign classes at Central Piedmont told her a girl she met in class was there because “she saw a group called Handprints that touched her so much she wanted to learn.”
Newspaper Details
Kannapolis Daily Independent
Kannapolis, North Carolina, US
Wed, Oct 10, 1984
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Andrew A.
FL, USA 08 Aug 2020
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Kannapolis Daily Independent
