I stared at Kaseem, wondering if my ears were playing tricks on me. I'd just asked him what he was growing in his gardening group. I had not been expecting an answer, I never did when speaking to Kaseem. But now I had one anyway; cabbages.
Kaseem is selectively mute. He can talk nearly as well as any other 15 year old, yet he chooses not to. When he first came to us, he refused to communicate in any way at all. He stood by our doors, watching everything that went on, but never responding to any of it. Even a smile was a rare cause for celebration.
Gradually Kaseem began to be more communicative. He smiled more, and started pulling wonderful faces; eyebrows twitching up and down, nose scrunching, mouth opening and closing. Mostly we had no idea what he was trying to say with these faces, but it was fun to watch anyway.
After a while, Kaseem started pointing to symbols and words to talk to us. Then he started using thumbs up and thumbs down to tell us if something was good or bad. Sometimes Kaseem would read to us, and we would all smile at the sound of his voice, and wish that we could hear it speaking his own words rather than someone else's.
From the time that Kaseem came to our ward, my staff and I talked to him as we would anyone else, so my question about gardening was nothing unusual. The answer, on the other hand, was.
"Cabbages."
With a huge smile on my face that I could not suppress, I asked him if he was growing anything else.
"Strawberries. Lettuces. Potatoes."
At this point I could have hugged him. Emma, the staff member who had been doing the gardening with him came over and asked him what else he did that afternoon.
"Hammering nails."
What was he making, I wanted to know.
"Boxes for compost."
By this time we had the attention of everyone in the room, and I was swallowing a lump in my throat.
Emma pointed out to him that he had hammered something else, and he grinned.
"Emma's thumb" he told me with a distinctly cheeky tone.
I wanted to know if that was an accident.
"No"
"Are you winding me up now?" I asked.
"Yes".
Everybody laughed, slightly delirious with the feeling that six months of frustrating silence might finally be coming to an end. Six months of patiently allowing Kaseem his silence, of providing him with security and stability so that he might one day be confident to speak, was beginning to pay off.
I'll never be able to look at a cabbage again without remembering my first conversation with Kaseem, six months after meeting him.
