Welcoming New Residents, Embracing a New Challenge

When American House Village of Rochester welcomed new residents David and Marlene in February 2025, the community came together to embrace a new kind of challenge. David and Marlene, who have been married for 50 years, have both been deaf since birth.

Life Enrichment Director Joanne Tsamaidis said they always want new residents to feel welcome when they arrive and have always had residents who have vision impairment or are hard of hearing, but they’ve never had residents whose principal language is American Sign Language.

As the team prepared to welcome David and Marlene and the unique challenge they posed, one of the volunteer residents said, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we learned a few signs to greet them?” and a collective lightbulb went off. Joanne considers it her mission to build a community that cares for each other and thought it was fantastic that a resident came up with the idea. Inspired, Joanne started reaching out to the Rochester community about the challenge she was facing, asking if anyone was interested in volunteering their help. Sure enough, an American Sign Language teacher from Stoney Creek High School named Christy responded and said she’d love to help. Christy suggested she bring in 18 students from her advanced sign language class to lead the event at American House.

With such a large group coming, Joanne created an “An Introduction to American Sign Language Bingo and Bagels” event, with the hope eight to 10 residents would attend to learn a little sign language. Much to Joanne’s surprise, over 20 residents from all three manors showed up. Christy divided her students into teams of two or three and they sat down with the residents for one-on-one sign language sessions that lasted about 20 minutes.
“Our residents were really happy to talk to the students,” Joanne said. “They spent some quality time signing with David and Marlene, who were both really energized by having so many people making such an effort to communicate with them.”

Christy took it a step further and asked the residents if they could give the students some advice.
The residents began writing down their knowledge and wisdom for the students. One married couple, Bruce and Dardy, said the students shouldn’t focus their thinking solely about themselves, but about other people instead.

Towards the end of the event, the students got together as a group to say goodbye and signed “thank you” to everyone.

“What’s really nice,” Joanne said, “is that the students want to come back. It was just so uplifting for everyone who was here. The event heightened the sensitivity to the way we will all continue to communicate and make things friendly for David and Marlene. Marlene is very good at lip reading and one of her favorite things to do is play bingo. So now instead of just calling out bingo, we now project it on the big TV so Marlene can relax more and see everything on screen. We’re much mindful now of how we can modify things to be inclusive for David and Marlene.”

David and Marlene have four children—all who can hear, but whose first language was American Sign Language—and Marlene enjoyed a very special birthday when she recently turned 90. The happy couple are settling in nicely into their new home and their children say their parents are happy and energized about how they’ve been accepted into the American House family.

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