New World Opens for Deaf Waif : He Hears for First Time in Young Life

Not long ago, 10-year-old Jose de Jesus Aguilar lived in his own silent world among the hundreds of young beggars and street urchins who roam the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez.

But through a twist of fate, the deaf and mute boy has become an international celebrity. And this week, the world of speech and music was opened to him as Los Angeles doctors completed an operation on his inner ear.

“It’s the first time he’s ever heard anything,” said Dr. Jack Pulec, after he connected a small, portable computer processor Thursday afternoon to an implant that had been placed inside Jose’s ear last December.

Jose seemed to enjoy the procedure as much as he would having a tooth pulled, crying and casting dirty looks at Pulec as the doctor placed a small probe in his ear.

New Sense of Hearing

A few minutes later, however, the tears were gone and Jose began experimenting with his new sense of hearing by tapping crude melodies on an electronic keyboard.

Sitting quietly and listening to the boy was a man who knows a little about keyboards and melodies himself--pianist and singer Ray Charles. The blind musician’s contributions to the nonprofit Ear International foundation helped pay for the $26,000 operation.

“I wanted to meet him,” Charles said. “He’s a very nice little kid and this is a very wonderful thing.”

Jose now lives in a children’s home in Ciudad Victoria, in the central Mexican state of Tamaulipas. His plane trip to Los Angeles and the operation were only the latest adventures in his short but eventful life.

In 1987, Jose, then 8, was found wandering the streets of Ciudad Juarez, carrying all of his possessions in a small airline flight bag. Unable to communicate with the boy, social workers nicknamed him “Sabat,” a name derived from the Spanish word for Saturday, the day he was found.

The social workers spent eight months trying to learn Jose’s identity, and when he began drawing graphic pictures of planes crashing, they concluded that he was the lone survivor of a family killed in a plane crash.

Soon, the boy’s case had received international media attention. Jose was taken to the local airport, where, it was hoped, he would be able to identify the type of plane in which his family presumably had crashed. A French woman also claimed for a time that Jose was her long-lost grandson, although she later admitted that she was mistaken.

The drawings, it turned out, were in part the product of Jose’s overactive imagination. Social workers found his mother, a poor barmaid, 700 miles from Ciudad Juarez in a poor section of the city of Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico, near the city’s airport.

Lives in Orphanage

The woman agreed to enroll Jose in the Casa Hogar del Nino, an orphanage where he now lives with 150 children. Sunday he will return to the home with his new-found sense of hearing.

“It’s something he’s been waiting and hoping for,” Jose Villacana, a psychologist at the home, said of the boy’s operation.

Although Jose has learned to read lips and can make a few sounds, he has not yet learned to speak more than a few simple words, such as his new nickname, “Pepe.”

Dr. James Smith there is “a real good chance” that with the implant, Jose will learn to speak, although the process could take years. For now, he hears only a mixture of sounds which his brain must still learn to interpret.

“It’s new to him,” Smith said. “We’re dealing with nerves that haven’t been exercised before.”

Jose’s education in speech and sound should go well. By all accounts, the wiry, gap-toothed boy is something of a prodigy.

“He’s pretty sophisticated. He’s already learned how to work this thing,” Smith said, pointing to the small computer that had been attached to Jose’s ear.