BILLINGS — For Roberta Frigon, sign language has been part of life since childhood. Raised by deaf parents, she learned to sign at an early age.
Now, the Billings woman is making sure that knowledge doesn't stop with her.
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“Both my parents were deaf,” Frigon said.
Sign language wasn't a lesson for Frigon. It was simply part of everyday life at home.
“Growing up with deaf parents was different, and I never knew that. I figured, I felt everyone was deaf when I was growing up,” Frigon said.
Years later, when her husband, Mike, came into her life, he wanted to learn sign language, too.
“I just thought it'd be respectful of me to learn that, so I could communicate with them,” Mike Frigon said.
Soon, sign language became part of their story, too. When they decided to get married, they even incorporated it into their wedding vows.
“Eventually, once we learned, and we decided to get married, we did our wedding vows in sign language,” Mike Frigon said.
Now, they are taking the language that connected their family and using it to connect their community.
“It's something we just feel that it's really important for the community to know how to communicate with deaf people,” Mike Frigon said.
Roberta Frigon says many people want to learn sign language but don't always know where to start.
“I believe sign language is one of the languages people want to learn, but they don't know where,” she said.
That opportunity came after a chance meeting with Secondhand and Steam owner Shawna Halverson, who wanted to make free classes available to the community.
“I wanted to offer this to the community so that everybody could actually enjoy them," Halverson said.
Halverson says she wanted her store to be more than a place to shop. She also wanted it to be a welcoming space where people could meet and connect.
“Opening the store is my favorite part. It's just meeting people because I want people to feel very welcome when they come in here,” Halverson said.
For Roberta Frigon, every person who learns to sign helps bridge the communication gap between the deaf community and the hearing community.
“What we're doing is we want to open up the deaf world to the community, because the community needs to know how to speak to a deaf person,” she said.
