With six uncles and two brothers born deaf, it was clear at an early age that sign language would become one of Grace Capek’s main methods of communication. “I always say it was my second language,” she says of signing. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I knew some signs before I could speak. Pretty much everyone (in the family) signed, but I had a keener interest in it.”

While her uncles had been sent to the city to residential school, Grace’s mother was determined to stay with her young children. So, in 1964, the family packed up their home in rural Onanole and took a bus for Winnipeg so her brothers could attend the Manitoba School for the Deaf.

In the mid-1980s, Grace began volunteering at her daughter Angie’s school and before she knew it, she was hired as an assistant. Word of her signing background soon spread and she was approached to act as a translator for a deaf boy entering a public school in St. Vital, a first for the district.

She spent her evenings and weekends taking sign language classes to enhance her skills as other deaf children began to enter the school division. “I loved it and I felt that it was really my niche. I loved working with children and especially deaf children,” she says. Her work even helped define interpreting as a job description within the school system.

What is Beauty?
People who go out of their way to do nice things for other people, putting their own feelings on the back burner and looking out for somebody else’s feelings who maybe can’t look out for themselves.

But throwing herself into signing all day for so many years began to take its toll on her body so Grace transferred from high school to grade one to minimize the strain with shorter hours. “It was like I started school all over again!” she laughs.

It was the challenge of seeing how difficult life could be for her family members who couldn’t communicate like everyone else that really drove Grace to dedicate her own life to communicating with them. “So when I could be involved in different things, it brought them into a different light with people. And I think that still happens now with probably a lot of handicapped people. The more they can get involved in the rest of the world, with people their age, then they become more normal looking.”

There’s an air of pride when Grace looks back at how her signing has helped so many children. “It was always really important working with schools to make these kids like everybody else,” she says. “I didn’t know it was going to come out this wonderful.” Now the advent of cell phones and BlackBerrys has opened up worlds of communication for deaf people, and she sees them out in the community and being a part of that world.

Despite retiring in 2005 after 24 years in the St. Vital School Division, she’ll never really be done giving her time. She continues to volunteer, now at her granddaughter Anna’s school and painting faces for kids at the Bombers games. She also spends time at Deaf Centre Manitoba, where her one remaining uncle and her mother live full-time. “That’s where the fun of life is,” she explains. “You don’t need to be thanked; you just need people to feel good about themselves.”