Girl needs more time to make friends

The responsibilities that go along with being a hearing child of deaf parents -- signing in public, ordering for them in restaurants and answering the phone -- don’t faze 10-year-old Rachel Weaver.

The outspoken fifth-grader has been translating for them the last few years and especially enjoys the attention she receives in public. People often ask the sandy-haired girl if sign language is hard to learn, she said, adding that she replies: “No, it’s easy. I just learned it when I was a little kid.”

When her older brother Ryan was diagnosed with leukemia two years ago, however, the youngster couldn’t facilitate the necessary dialogue between the doctors and her parents. The children’s grandmothers, Carol Charron and Ernie Knect, took on that role.

“There was a lot of confusion,” Charron said. “Both parents read at a fifth-grade level” even though each finished high school, she added.

“We had some family problems. I hear that is normal, but it was nerve-racking,” Knect said. “I can’t explain the emotional stress that was put on all of us.”

Rachel, who was used to a lot of attention from her mother, bounced among relatives during Ryan’s hospitalization while her younger sister Crista, then 2, stayed with their mother.

“My parents were upset, especially my mom. She was crying about him, like, every day, because she thought he would die,” Rachel said. “He could have died.”

Ryan’s cancer went into remission a couple of months later, so he was able to come home. But he still is undergoing chemotherapy.

Charron said Rachel has felt a little neglected at times. “She even said to him, ‘I wish I would have been the one who got the leukemia for all the attention you’re getting.’ ”

The family then realized that Rachel needed new experiences to become more self-assured and to develop relationships outside her family, especially since she had few friends of her age in their Moreno Valley neighborhood.

She now plays soccer, and this summer Rachel is going to camp for the first time, with help from the Los Angeles Times Summer Camp Fund.

She and her cousin Kelsey will participate in “Theater in the Woods” at Camp Scherman next week. Charron picked the camp drama program because the girls love to lip sync and choreograph songs at holiday family gatherings.

Rachel is not sure what to expect at camp, but she thinks it would be fun to show her new friends some sign language.

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About 11,000 children will go to camp this summer, thanks to the $1.4 million raised last year.

The annual fund-raising campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which this year will match the first $1 million in contributions at 50 cents on the dollar.

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