As I write this, I am currently in what amounts to the middle of nowhere, central Texas, working as a volunteer at an archaeological field school, ready to sell a kingdom for a good hot biscuit, and surrounded by colonies of fire ants. I also have very limited internet, so y’all are very lucky to get this post from me.

Besides hot biscuits, I am also without a cued language transliterator. This was mainly by choice. A choice which reminds me everyday of how lucky I was to have transliterators all through public school and college. I even had a CLT for the first field school I completed 3 years ago in Virginia! So, why go without? I thought of it as a field test of sorts, you see, an experiment from which I could learn how working with a team on a long-term project (2 months in this case) sans cued speech might function. Unlike some other deaf cuer peers, I do not use my cochlear implant as much, nor nearly as well, so CLTs (and other accommodations like CART and/or c-print) are still important for me at times. However, I have no illusions I will get regular access to a CLT as an archaeologist due to small budgets, long trips and field situations normal mortals including transliterators, (i.e. non-archaeologists), would not willingly go through, so I thought it prudent to find a somewhat controlled environment (e.g. a field school) and work out my weaknesses while getting more practical experience in my field. 

So far, it’s as I expected, hot, dry, no running water, long working hours, endless strings of blabbity-blab mouths moving. None of the students have heard of cued speech of course, but I still wear my sun-color changing cue-wheel shirt to work at the ranch where our site is. I do miss the clarity of cued speech, oh yeah… Lots of errors flying ’round! The other day while returning to home base from the site, we got stopped by a long procession of emergency vehicles from various county and city departments. When our driver explained that “someone in emergency services died, and this is a funeral procession,” my brain’s “lipreading processing center” sent impulses from the wrong directory, and I read the last two words as ‘federal possession.’ Puzzled, I watched all the ambulances, police cruisers, and fire trucks pass, trying to figure out just how the Liberty Hill city FD and Williamston county PD counted as FBI, and who this one person was who’d died and made it necessary for the Feds to step in! 

Despite being without a CLT for now, I am very thankful I had good luck with access to transliterators for academic settings. I’ve found find them to be far superior to transcriptionists and other accommodations. Without them, I wouldn’t have gotten where I am now- able to contemplate going into archaeology! I am also thankful the transliterators I had were in the main, very, very durable, because I was very ambitious in my class choices. Earlier I mentioned a CLT who worked with me in Virginia at a field school- the lady drove for 2 hours a day from Charlottesville to be there to cue 8 hours, 5 days a week, mostly spent outdoors in western Virginian heat and humidity, next to an excavation site (or what would amount to a ‘dirt pit’ for most people). Hats off to her. Three different transliterators were also subjected to three different language classes, and none knew the languages they were trying to cue, but they pulled through. College classes, especially the labs, must have been a literal pain, because I usually only had one CLT, not the two that are now ideally recommended for long lecture situations. So, here’s a big thank you to all transliterators, not just the ones who cued for me! Here’s hoping many others will have the same good fortune and choices I did with CLT access.