Born in 1981, Nicki Kennedy grew up in the mountains. Her parents had a home in Gilpin County, and her maternal grandparents lived on Bonnie Road, off of Lazy Z. Nicki alternated between the two.

“When I think about growing up in the valley I think about the smells of things. The smell of sage and sunshine on the ponderosa pine. In the winter the smell of wood smoke, snow, and decaying aspen leaves. The dampness from a nearby creek, cow parsnips, violets. My brother and I spent hours running amuk in the woods. We were minimally supervised, in a way that was good and right.”

Nicki started Nederland Elementary back when it was in the Community Center.“We were way out in the boonies at the time, we got to do things that didn’t fit into today’s standardized education.” From fourth to seventh grade the kids were given outdoor survival training – how to build a snow cave, start a fire, all the things you need to know to live in the mountains.

Her family took summer road trips, mostly to Ohio and New York to visit relatives. That gave Nicki “a feel for how other people live. I saw people with different skin colors, and heard different voices and languages, things we didn’t have in Ned or Boulder.”

When it was time for college Nicki knew she wanted to teach. She left the mountains for Hastings College in Nebraska. Quite a change from Bonnie Road. “I was the hippiest thing my classmates had ever seen.” She graduated with a BA in Special Education.

Grad school was next, but her scholarship was deferred. Nicki worked at two homeless shelters, one in Gainesville, Florida. She remembers walking down a street with one of her charges, a black man in the South. He turned to her and said “when I was a kid, I’d be hanged for this.”

Grad school eventually happened at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. While there, she taught at a residential deaf school. At the same time she began to work in the deafblind community as an intervenor. “We take the environment these kids can’t see or hear and find ways to bring it to them.”

Nicki left the university with her Masters of Education in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Education. And with the greatest compliment of her teaching career, to date: “A boy I had worked with a few years before got into kindergarten. The teachers there noticed that someone had put a lot of effort into making him ready for the world. His mother called me and said ‘Thank you for teaching me how to love my son.’”

As a child, Nicki decided that one day she would go to Malawi, a tiny, land-locked country in Africa. Her grandfather taught there, and her mother told her stories about growing up there. After teaching for a few years it was time. Reaching back through her family connections, Nicki found the Malawi Children’s Village, where she was hired to teach for a year. For free.

Without the money to get there, much less live in Malawi for a year, Nicki wrote everyone she knew asking for contributions. She held a fundraiser at the Stage Stop. She raised $10,000, took no pay for her entire year in Africa, and returned to Nederland with $200.

Ned, because when she left, she promised her family she would spend a year with them. That was in 2011 and she’s still here. Now she owns and lives in what was her grandparents’ house on Bonnie Road, with Adam and their two sons – the youngest was born in the house earlier this year. Nicki teaches children who are deaf and have another challenge. For example, deaf and blind, or deaf with cerebral palsy. “I take kids three years old to fourth grade, who have no functional language for any of a myriad of reasons, and my job is to give it to them. I work with them to help them try to find it in themselves.”

Deaf people don’t fingerspell their whole names every time. They have shorter sign names, usually based on a characteristic. A deaf kid with curly hair might have the sign name of a finger curling like her hair. Part of Nicki’s job is to teach them a sign name. She had an eight year old girl who was totally deaf and could not talk at all; The girl had a rich, readyto go brain but she had no way to express her thoughts, to name herself, to name her family. Then Nicki gave her a name.

“It was the first time she was able to refer to herself. Two days later she took my ID badge and named me her and her me. In doing so she told her first joke. She gained 500 or 600 more signs in just a few months. She took off like nobody’s business and learned and learned and learned. Giving kids language cracks the door, sometimes wide open. Language is a right, language is a gift, it’s the most powerful thing you can give a person.”

Nicki’s own sign name is based on a big characteristic of hers. It’s an N, but that’s not the characteristic. It’s an N fingerspelled over her heart.

[BELLA LORENA: Amo la mia bella donna friulana.]