‘We can do everything but hear’

Dorianne and Keith Callus are sitting at their kitchen table when they turn around in a synchronised, sudden move – their son Jamie just tripped on a toy. The deaf couple do not hear their son’s thump but feel the vibration of his fall and run to his assistance. The two-year-old is soon playing and singing loudly and his mother tells him not to shout as his facial expressions reveal he has upped his volume. Ms Callus, 33, and her 37-year-old husband were born profoundly deaf after, in both cases, their mothers experienced medical problems during pregnancy. Given their condition is not genetic, they were not concerned that their son would be deaf. Even if he were, “such things are in God’s hands,” Mr Callus says with the help of an interpreter. “We can do anything except hear and our main obstacle is the communication barrier,” his wife says as she signals in Maltese sign language for her husband to follow. Unlike her husband she can speak fluently, except for not being able to pronounce a few sounds, and she attributes this to the support her parents gave her as a child. “Whatever I learnt at school I would go through again at home with my parents… My mother and I would sit down,...