Josh Swiller found himself at home in Zambia, the remote African village  where he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. It was an unusual place for a white, deaf, Jewish guy to find himself fitting in, but the slow pace of life in Zambia meant that Josh could find a communication ease that he hadn’t experienced elsewhere. Here in the village, the locals slowed their speech down and spoke loud enough for the American helper to understand.

During the first weeks of Peace Corps training, Josh wandered into a deaf school.  Each morning he volunteered his time teaching math to the African deaf children alongside a teacher who polished off maize wine during class time. Josh was assigned by the Peace Corps to help the residents of Zambia dig wells for fresh water, but he found resistance among the villagers to take on the project. It took an entire year to deepen an existing well to bring cleaner water to the villagers.

Josh took his Peace Corps experience and an extraordinary friendship with Augusta Jere, a Zambian native, and turned it into a memoir:  The Unheard.  After being fired from his job at a law firm, Josh crashed at a friend’s barn in Maine and spent five months writing the first draft of his book. He sent it off to the publishers, and seven of them rejected it. “They didn’t see how the deafness theme and the Africa theme could successfully relate,” said Josh. The book was published by Henry Holt in the fall of 2007 and received stellar reviews.

“I knew long before I sat down to write this book what it was,” said Josh. “I wanted to honor certain people, but I also wanted to write about deeper truths in life.”

Josh and his brother Sam were both born deaf.  For 10 years, a devoted audiologist named Adele worked on developing their speech skills and helped them make use of what hearing they could manage through hearing aids.

As Josh shares in The Unheard:
We worked hard at hearing. My mother spent hours every day laboriously repeating words and phrases that gave Sam and me difficulty. It’s not that easy to say ‘the snakes slid through the sand,’ a hundred times before dinner, but she never once complained or gave up. On weekends, my father read entire novels to us.

I was extremely grateful to my parents for their dedication. I have to point out, though,  one confusing aspect of their approach: despite all their work, they never wanted to talk about deafness. I don’t think they were ashamed of it so much as they worried that mentioning it too often would damage my self-confidence, but I wasn’t able to grasp that distinction at a young age.  I was certain something was so wrong with me that it couldn’t even be mentioned.  If everyone avoids something, it has to be a bad thing, no?

As comforting as it was to grow up with a deaf brother, Josh did not have contact with another deaf or hard-of-hearing person until after he graduated from Yale. He spent a year at Gallaudet University, where the majority of the students communicated in American Sign Language.

“I wanted to learn more about deafness; it’s as simple as that,” said Josh about his choice to go to Gallaudet. “For the first three months, I took sign language classes.” A writing job at the Alumni newsletter allowed Josh to stay on campus and continue to immerse himself in American Sign Language.

In 2004, Josh lost the rest of his hearing and spent two years without hearing aids.  He and his brother Sam obtained cochlear implants around the same time, and together they learned to listen to the new sounds they heard through their processors. Josh shares the experience of hearing with the cochlear implant on his blog, Cochbla.

“For me, they work,” Josh shared. “They gave me back my hearing, but that’s just one small aspect of life. Happiness is an internal condition that has nothing to do with volume.”

After the book was published, Josh dreamed of connecting with Jere, his friend from Africa. He had hoped to return to Africa to find him again. In December of 2007, he had an incredible opportunity to connect with him via telephone.  It began with a simple message from a man who had read his book: “I have read your book and would like to help you find Jere. I work out here in Zambia, and it would mean a lot to me.”

Two weeks later, Josh found himself dialing the numbers that would connect him with his friend. “I was scared that I wouldn’t hear,” Josh writes on his blog. “We talked for 15 minutes. It was so beautiful, but so frustrating! The voice was as I remembered or—more accurately—the voice triggered memories. But even though I could hear his voice, I could barely make out the words it carried."

Josh is working on his next novel; he has plans to return to Africa to reconnect with his old friend and to film a documentary.