DANCING ROUND THE WORLD BUT THEY DON'T HEAR THE MUSIC

SIX boys from Lebanon are in London this week performing traditional mountain dances. Wearing embroidered jackets and baggy trousers tucked into black boots, they stamp their feet and twirl round the stage, their timing as precise as a professional chorus line.
But the laughing, black-eyed boys cannot hear a sound from the Oriental record that plays while they dance. They are all deaf. Most of them have been since they were born.
Instead of listening to the music, they N+atch their teacher silently mouth "One, two, three. four"and they don't miss a beat.
The boys, aged 13 to 20, come from ''The Home in the Hills" started by Fr. Ronald Roberts, from Essex, six years ago at Harissa, outside Beirut.
He had permission from the Bishop of Brentwood to set up a home for invalids there. As soon as he started, people began bringing deaf children to him. boys who had been completely isolated from their friends and families because they couldn't hear and couldn't talk.
TRAINED TEACHERS So instead of concentrating on the invalids,' he turned to them. Ile brought in trained teachers and started experimenting.
The boys responded eagerly. They had to exercise muscles they had never used before, their tongues, their lungs. They had to work hard. The most difficult thing was learning to think in words and sentences for the first time in their lives. The next hardest thing was learning to relax.
Today, there are 45 at the home, reading and writing Arabic. lipreading perfectly when others speak. Marty of them arc already picking up French and English as well. And they are talking. too.
And dancing. A few months ago a Dutch woman who visited them was so impressed with their dances that she insisted they went to Holland and performed on television.
The National Tourism Board of Lebanon and Middle East Airlines arranged a trip, and they set off last week. First they went to Rome for a private audience with the Pope. Then they came to London.
DEAF PROGRAMME
On Sunday, BBC-2 filmed them for its programmes for the deaf, and on Monday evening they performed at the Grail Farm in Pinner, Middlesex. Two members of the English Grail movement who are stationed in Lebanon had made firm friends with Fr. Roberts and his boys, spending their spare time helping out at the home.
During their stay in London, the boys are also visiting representatives of OXFAM, which has given many contributions to the home, and members of the Catholic Women's League who gave them a minibus last year to travel round in.
"We never ask for contributions," says Fr. Roberts. "When people see what We are doing they want to help."
And during the tour he is trying to spread another idea: "Too often the Church seems to regard helping the handicapped as a sideline. Instead, the Church should be in the forefront of all work for the handicapped, teaching the deaf to hear with their eyes, the blind to see with their hands.
"It should be devoting real time. energy and money to solving these problems, not just to cures, but also research.
"In Rome we see all the government of the Church. Instead, it
should be a super-OXI-A \I Charitable groups in the Church are individual efforts. Most are independent of the Bishop. instead he should be the head of all the charity in the diocese."