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FALL 2017 / 9
With ambition and a commitment to service, Charlie Vines ’16,
who graduated with a degree in business administration, recently
moved to Jamaica for 10 weeks to live and work in a village for the
hearing impaired.
During his time at BSC, Vines played for the football team
and participated in Reformed University Fellowship. During his
sophomore year, he signed up for an RUF spring break trip that
took him to volunteer at a deaf school in Knockpatrick, Jamaica.
Two years later, for his senior spring break, he returned to work in
the Jamaica Deaf Village run by the Caribbean Christian Centre for
the Deaf in the Parish of Manchester.
While there, he learned of an opportunity to return as a short-
term missionary to Jamaica Deaf Village, a community where 20
hearing impaired adults and their families live and work.
“I have jumped at the chance to be able to work with the deaf,
and I am so excited to have this once-in-a-lifetime experience,”
Vines wrote in his blog. To prepare himself, he took two sign
language classes after graduation and interned in the deaf services
department of the Jefferson-Blount-St. Clair Mental Health
Authority.
In Jamaica, he has helped teams build houses so village residents
can move out of the apartments they currently use, poured concrete
for new roads, and planted citrus trees. He has also visited a deaf
school in the Jamaican capital of Kingston to research a coffee-
canning business started there. He says the days are long—he
usually leaves his room around 6:45 a.m. and doesn’t return until
10 or 11 p.m.—but the work is rewarding.
“I just want to bring light to the fact that being deaf is not
a disability or a disadvantage,” Vines said. “It’s just a different
perspective.”
fresh off the hilltop
A spring break service project leads to
a heart for the hearing impaired
Vines with a mission worker from Illinois