KDurant7 blog adventures

Bolivia 1979-present

Our first son was born early at 7 months and soon after a month old we noticed loud noises, like low flying airplanes, did not bother him. Regina and I took him to the doctor, and it was confirmed, he was not hearing! No one in our families had deafness and we were, at first, confused why God would want us to have this new challenge knowing nothing about it. The Lord showed us we were being ‘entrusted’ with this special mission to do all we could for him so he could be a witness to others about having faith in God. We got misinformation, a common thing to happen back then, from a deaf community that told us to teach lip reading. The first years of his life Paul memorized words in Spanish, and he actually learned to pronounce 100s of words with a speech-language pathologist we hired. His first language was Spanish until we switched to English when he was age 11. At age 5 we deducted he needed sign language not oral only, and when he learned it, he prospered in language ability very quickly! We often would spend several hours of our day talking with him, teaching him Bible verses. Getting him back and forth to special deaf schools was not an easy task either. Switching sign language from Colombia (Spanish) to ASL was a huge task and all of us worked many hours a day to master that! We always observed Paul was very intelligent and he would often tell us things about people we did not even notice. He started working at age 15 in the local Chick-Fil-A, then later in a print shop, and at Home Depot, never having a problem to communicate with notes from his bosses. He grew up handsome and several girls perused him, but he met his soul mate Vivi, and they married at age 20. He was very happy to communicate with someone fluidly and quickly and she has been a wonderful wife and mother to their 2 boys who are now grown up. Paul has lupus involving acute retinitis pigmentosa as well as diabetes. He has a real continuous struggle with his health, but despite that he has often worked 2 full time jobs to support his family. He works full time even now. He is the most positive, hardworking, even funniest person I know! For years he has had conversations with 1,000s of deaf followers teaching them about Jesus and the Bible (which is a difficult topic to comprehend when your memory is visual) and I am very proud of him! I have tried at times to experience total silence to understand him better. God always entrusts each person with special missions, challenges we cannot get through unless we depend totally on Him! This implies a daily, year after year fight to be shaped into being of great service to God and others. No matter difficulties you or I face, we must be persistent, God’s grace gives us the strength.