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Image that you don't know how a room, a mirror or even your face looks like ...
What color is the sky or how dripping water sounds like.
Image that you've never seen or heard anything before.
And now try to explain them all without using any visual or acustic information
It would simply be impossible.
And yet Vasile Adamescu does it every day of his life for over 67 years.
Vasile Adamnescu was from a very young age deafblind and nobody at that time believed he would be truly "human".
Studies show that during the first years of a deafblind child
they are in a sense "wild" as they don't have any feelings and don't distinguish between objects and people.
You can't educate one and you can't make one speak as they can't hear or see.
Vasile Adamnescu managed to do the impossible and even more.
It started with a single word.
Water
Water
When he first said the word he was 12 years old and was trying for over an year to make a sound.
It all started with A, apã (water), papã (food).
This was an big event at school where they talking about Adamescu saying A.
His ability is exceptional, making a deafblind child speak is still considered a miracle
or a very low probability experiment.
It's very hard to explain to a deafblind child that there is a language,
a connection between things and words and between feelings and expressions.
It would have to be an extremely intelligent child but how can you tell if you can't communicate with him?
When Vasile Adamescu was a child, Romania had no expert capable of educating a deafblind chilld.
There was only one very succesful case at that time
that of the american Hellen Keller but even her was considered a one of a kind exception.
A very difficult method, developed by her teacher, Anne Sullivan
helped Hellen Keller to use her other senses
to make a connection between the sound vibration, the mouth movement and the tongue's position for every letter.
Vasile Adamnescu also had his chance.
At the Cluj school for the blind, a teacher named Florica Sandu figured his intellectual potential
and tried the Keller experiment on him.
She first explained to him that every thing has a name.
She taught me a few signs.
Water.
Water.
When I was hungry, I used to put my hand on my belly.
After tedious hours of explanations and reversals, the teacher learned him to feel the information
because he didn't had any other ways of getting it.
The teacher used to write different human parts: first on my palm then on my forehead.
She then taught him to pronounce letter by letter and then word by word.
Year after year, Vasile Adamescu tried to understand, to speak and to form entire phrases.
I felt the lower lip, the cheek, the neck.
I was feeling how she pronounced the sound and I understood it.
It was terrible hard for a child that didn't know what was going on around him
that was living in a universe drawned in darkness and silence.
It was extremely dificult to make him understand abstract ideas
and make him describe feelings, a task even a normal person has problems doing.
Little by little, his conscience started awakening.
The little "savage", the child that nobody could communicate to, learned to be a human.
At the age of 17, he knew how to talk, he finished primary school and dreamed of going to a university.
Do you understand what I'm trying to say?
Yes, I undertand.
I manage to communicate with anyone if I explain them my way of communicating.
Today, in the world there are only 20 more people like him around the world.
In Romania, he's unique.
What makes him remarcable, is his restless willingness to know, to discover
to feel the world around him, to learn until exhausted.
He graduated the National School of Arts and the Special Psychopedagogy Faculty,
he become a teacher at the School for the blind and learned 5 foreign languages.
It's astonishing for a man that lived a significant part of his life not knowing the meaning of words.
His remarkable intelligence and a one of a kind talent, helps him model his own word.
A world without sounds or colors but one that he improves every day.
Not long ago, I showed him different dance styles by putting his hand on the speakers.
For those around him, he's almost a superhuman.
Since 2004 he's retired from the High-school for the blind but he still teaches in his free time, free of charge
at the modelling workshop he has set up at home.
When I first saw him, he gave me courage to go past this disadvantage.
Instead of becoming a meaner person because of his problems, he was protected for all things that could alter the human spirit.
We are sitting next to a man that never in life swore, never said a vulgar word, never said something bad about another person.
Where else can you find today such a man?
For Vasile Adamescu, people are hand shakes, shapes, smells, sensations
perfect beings that he can't see but he can imagine from his own vision.
I see with my hand instead of my eye.
For example, I do a lot of modelling with my hands after people faces.