Birthday Celebrates a New Start for a Deserving Woman

She took the little white bear out of my hands, smiling like a little girl, thrilled and puzzled at the idea that we were there to celebrate her. When Peggie Reyna walked in and presented Alicia with a chocolate cake topped with blazing candles, she looked like a child on an especially bountiful Christmas morning.

But Alicia is no child. She is a tiny, fragile woman whose life had been a grim story of unpleasant chapters until she met Reyna a little more than a year ago.

Reyna, a specialist on deaf, blind and physically disabled women for the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, met Alicia after being called to King-Drew Medical Center by a social worker stumped by the young woman’s inability to communicate.

Alicia, who turned 24 on Monday, was born in Mexico and moved here with her family as a girl. Sometime during her childhood, she lost her hearing. She says she spent many years as a virtual slave in her home, abused by her family and kept out of school. She has told her story to social workers, police and prosecutors, who declined to charge the family with any crimes because of Alicia’s inability to communicate clearly in a courtroom. When she finally decided to flee, the only way out was through her second-story window. She says she let herself down with a sheet and fell the rest of the way when she ran out of material. Bruised and dazed, she ended up at the hospital.

She had never learned sign language and could not speak. She was too old to qualify for public aid to children, and because she is not a citizen, she could not qualify for help available to adults.

Her future looked bleak--until she met Reyna.

Reyna’s compassion and dedication to helping disabled women who have been battered culminated in the virtual adoption of Alicia, whose name has been changed for this story. With Reyna’s help, Alicia found a spot in a group home for deaf adults, is learning sign language and is undergoing counseling.

After I wrote about Alicia in February, many readers called or wrote with offers of help. Some offered television sets and VCRs with closed caption capabilities. Some sent checks, some sent cash.

At least half a dozen producers or their representatives called as well, interested in turning the story of Alicia and her friendship with Reyna into a television movie. They saw the possibility of a heartwarming tale about a friendship that can change a life.

What they didn’t know was that years ago, Reyna’s teen-age daughter, Rhonda, died of a brain aneurysm. When Alicia saw Rhonda’s photograph at Reyna’s home, she turned to Sharon Hamilton, Reyna’s roommate, and said, in signs: “Rhonda dead. Peggie cry. Alicia here for Rhonda.”

“I got goose bumps,” Hamilton said. “I don’t know how she knew.”

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On Monday, Alicia’s birthday party was a prelude to more serious business, the third meeting of a new task force, “For Deaf Women Too.”

The idea for the task force grew out of a conference on deaf and disabled women, sponsored by the Southern California Women’s Law Center last fall. A group of women, including Reyna, decided that it wasn’t enough to just talk about the problems faced by deaf women who have been battered.

With support from the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, which provides meeting space for the group at its Hollywood offices, task force members hope to expand support services for deaf women--who, like women with other disabilities, are particularly vulnerable to abuse.

The members, most of whom are deaf, are working on projects as disparate as fund raising, creating support groups and developing training materials for staff at battered women’s shelters.

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Alicia is still experiencing for the first time the everyday events most of us take for granted.

Reyna took Alicia to a beauty shop for her birthday. Her straight, jet black hair now falls in gentle curls around her face. She had her first manicure too, and on Monday, showed me frosted pink paint on stubby nails.

Alicia’s vocabulary is still growing too.

“Yesterday, when we went to dinner, I had trout,” Reyna said. “She had never seen that kind of fish before. I told her it was fish and it was trout. She is learning that every fish is not just named ‘fish,’ and that every tree is not just named ‘tree.’ ”

She is also learning words to express less tangible things.

“She’s in counseling, and it is hard,” Reyna said. “She is working on signs and feelings and what the signs are to express those feelings.”

If a deal for a TV movie is signed, Reyna hopes to use the money to send Alicia to Gallaudet College, the renowned university for the deaf in Washington, D.C.

“Because of the size and diversity of the population there,” Reyna said, “they have programs for deaf immigrants. We are really excited.”

Alicia’s story may get a Hollywood ending after all.