“Hands up, if you love fam­i­ly, show me your hands if you is one of we”.

So sings St Vin­cent and the Grenadines so­ca sen­sa­tion Gamal “Skin­ny Fab­u­lous” Doyle in his verse of this year’s Road March con­tender “Famalay”.

Well, it ap­pears that the girls of Con­vent High School (CHS) in Do­mini­ca ac­cept­ed the chal­lenge and did just that.

They per­formed the song us­ing Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage (ASL).

Their teacher Le­an­dra Lan­der up­loaded a video of their ren­di­tion of the song to Face­book on Wednes­day and up to Thurs­day, it was viewed more than 31,000 times.

“We are sen­si­tive there are peo­ple who can­not hear so we use our hands,” Lan­der told Guardian Me­dia in a tele­phone in­ter­view on Thurs­day.

Lan­der said when she was study­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ Mona cam­pus in Ja­maica she got in­volved in sign lan­guage.

When she re­turned to Do­mini­ca to teach she in­tro­duced a Sign Lan­guage Club at CHS.

Cur­rent­ly, there are 40 girls in the club.

“Every week we meet to learn vo­cab­u­lary then we would use mu­sic as a way to ce­ment the in­for­ma­tion in their mind,” Lan­der said.

“Be­cause if they can start as­so­ci­at­ing words and signs, they can per­form it in mu­sic which is faster for them to learn,” she said.

“So since then we have done pro­duc­tions, we’ve done plays so they have signed al­most every genre by now. We have done Bouy­on, Gospel, Clas­si­cal, the (Do­mini­can) na­tion­al an­them, the school song, so any­thing we can get our hands on we sign,” she said.

Lan­der said the aim of the club was to do more videos this year and get peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in sign lan­guage.

“This year, one of our aims was to do a lot more videos for the pub­lic so that peo­ple can learn a lit­tle thing be­cause of­ten when we go to per­form on stage at least one per­son in the au­di­ence should learn one word and be able to sign it out,” she said.

So on Sat­ur­day, Lan­der and girls shot the video for the song.

It took two hours to record.

Lan­der said the rea­son she chose “Famalay” was be­cause the song was pro­duced in Do­mini­ca by a na­tion­al named Kr­ish­na “Da­da” Lawrence.

On Wednes­day, she post­ed the three-minute video with the cap­tion:

“You’ve heard ‘Famalay’ a mil­lion times! But here it is in Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage (ASL).

My ba­bies, the CHS Sign Lan­guage Club in sign and chore­og­ra­phy con­tin­ues to pro­mote the skill while strength­en­ing the bonds of our fam­i­ly!

UMO­JA CHS of DO­MINI­CA con­tin­ues to build the con­fi­dence in our girls!”

Umo­ja is the Swahili word for “uni­ty”.

Lan­der said she did not ex­pect the re­sponse the video has since got­ten.

“I to­tal­ly didn’t ex­pect this re­ac­tion. Be­cause Famalay is so well loved we did ex­pect to go a lit­tle far but when I checked it was 18,000 views this morn­ing so I was like ‘wow’,” she said.

While ASL has a gram­mar of its own Lan­der said the video was done as “di­rect sign as we speak”.

Lan­der said the most grat­i­fy­ing thing for her since the for­ma­tion of the CHS Sign Lan­guage Club is when her stu­dents talk­ing say they have been able to com­mu­ni­cate with hear­ing im­paired per­sons.

Lan­der said the video was 90 per cent ASL and al­so in­clud­ed spe­cial chore­og­ra­phy.

Two of T&T’s most eas­i­ly recog­nis­able so­ca artistes Machel Mon­tano and Ian “Bun­ji Gar­lin” Al­varez al­so sing Famalay.