Abu Yahya is thirty, deaf, and runs a business from home. What he needed was not sympathy. It was a customer base.
He is thirty years old, married, with two young children. He is deaf, and speaks with his hands, the loss of hearing having taken speech with it.
None of that is the interesting part of his story, and the fact that it is usually treated as the whole story is precisely the problem.
“He was already running a business. What he lacked was equipment and a market, the same two things any other small trader lacks.”
Abu Yahya was running a small enterprise from his home in Al-Kitteh, in Jerash. He was, in other words, already a businessman before anyone arrived. What he was missing were two ordinary things that would be identified instantly in any other entrepreneur: equipment, and a way of reaching buyers.
The Goodwill Campaign team assessed what the enterprise actually required and supplied it. Then they did the less obvious thing: they enrolled him in a five-day training course in effective marketing at Princess Basma Development Centre in Jerash, aimed at raising productivity and income.
A five-day marketing course is not a moving intervention. It will not appear in a fundraising film. But consider what it assumes about the person receiving it: that he is a trader who needs to sell more, and that the appropriate response to a deaf entrepreneur is the same as to a hearing one: teach him to market.
Most disability programming does not begin from that assumption. It begins from need, and it delivers relief, and it quietly communicates to the recipient that he is a case. Abu Yahya was treated as a business with a growth problem.
The practical results are ordinary and therefore trustworthy: better equipment, sharper marketing, higher output, more income into a household with two small children in it.
There is a video of the project held by the communications department, and he gave written consent for photography, a man perfectly willing to be seen working.
The most respectful thing anyone did for Abu Yahya was to bore him with a marketing course.
