For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  The school’s courtyard, a little smaller than a tennis court, was full of blind Tibetan children of varying ages and sizes. Some were kicking a ball around; some were singing along with a Dolly Parton tune on a cassette player parked on an outdoor staircase; one boy, stripped to the waist, was washing his hair at a spigot in the corner of the yard; several were wrestling on the ground; one plump girl was descending a long flight of outdoor stairs with a pile of laundry hugged tight in her arms. Two boys were sitting in the sunlight at the bottom of the front stoop, snapping sheets of bubble wrap held close to their ears. A girl in a pink jacket with its hood pulled up over her head stumbled out through a doorway, leading by the hand a smaller girl in sky-blue sneakers. The scene had the cheery abandon and unself-conscious intimacy of a Brueghel village panoptic. Some of the children had damaged eyes; one or two had no eyes at all; some had eyes that didn’t open. Others seemed to be able to see a little bit of light with one eye or the other. One boy of about six with a Band-Aid on his forehead was standing in the middle of the yard with his face lifted to the sky, his thumb and forefinger curled into a circle around his left eye, like a monocle, and his mouth twisted into a grimace of extreme effort as he struggled to catch a glimpse of the enormous sun. Many of the children had white canes. A serious-faced, big-eared boy of about thirteen with an orange down jacket, orange trousers, and a head shaven nearly to baldness sat in the sun on a wooden bench worrying a set of Tibetan prayer beads, eyes closed, lips moving. He wore black leather brogues with thick heels and big square metal buckles on their tops, the sort of shoes in which the persecuted British pilgrims clunked about on the decks of the Mayflower in 1620. With the shaven head, the orange clothing, and the beads, the boy resembled a Buddhist priest. He seemed unaware that at the end of his bench a large Tibetan mastiff with an enormous head lay locked in a wire cage. The Tibetan mastiff is a famously aggressive dog so frighteningly tough and hardy that he can happily sleep through the night buried under a few feet of snow.

  Distracted by the sight of the children, I didn’t realize at first that the blind teenager who had opened the gate was standing expectantly beside me, still grinning, waiting for me to identify myself. His double-breasted jacket seemed part of a costume, like the jacket of a dandified 1940s gangster. I thanked the boy for letting me in and said I was here to see Sabriye Tenberken.

  At the sound of my voice, the entire yard of children immediately stopped what they were doing and turned their heads in my direction. Silence replaced the school-yard din. It was obvious from the way the children’s expressions suddenly changed, from the way they stood statue-still and tilted their heads at me, that they knew I was someone new and knew exactly where I was standing in relation to them. After a long silence, I said, for want of anything better to say, “Hi, kids,” whereupon several of the children began to approach me slowly, their faces keen with curiosity, their chapped cheeks not just pink but raw-beef red, as if rasped by the powerful sun. Their hair was raven black and glossy as shellac in the intense light. They surrounded me and began to run their small hands over the hem and sleeves of my coat, the legs of my jeans, and my hands. I said hello to them, and hearing English, they began to question me in English. They told me how nice it was to meet me, wanted to know my name, where I was from, why I was here, how I was feeling today. At the sound of our conversation, the rest of the children gathered around and they, too, began to feel my clothing. Their warm hands were all over me, gently exploring with a soft tap-tapping, like airport security guards frisking for weapons. They felt my shoes, my ring, my fingers, my belt, my legs, my handbag, their hands doing for them what their eyes could not. The children were open and bold and yet shyly respectful at the same time. I was a newcomer, but they seemed to have no real wariness of me—instead, they approached me as if I were a novel object. Those who could see a little light squinted a lot as they talked to me. One boy gave me his full name with a regal nod of his head. Another boy with no front teeth and eyes crazily skewed in their sockets held my hand and said, “I am six years old.” He looked no more than three. Later, as I came to know the children better, I understood that they were all small for their ages.

  The only child in the yard who didn’t come to investigate me was the boy on the wooden bench, the monk with the prayer beads. Through it all, he continued to pray, lips moving, eyes closed, fingers stitching at the beads, an expression of serious inertia on his long face. He could not have cared less that a stranger had arrived. Either that or he was deaf as well as blind.

  The six-year-old who was missing his front teeth shook my hand with determination, then felt the watch on my wrist. He held my wrist to his chest, and, with fingertips that moved pickingly, like the feet of a spider, he thoroughly examined the watch and its strap. His breath was hot and moist on my knuckles. He lifted his red cheeks at me. “Watch, is it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  He pressed the watch to his ear, and, holding his breath, he listened awhile, his mouth hanging open in concentration, his unseeing eyes, a bit too big for their sockets, rolling a little in his head. Again he showed me his cheeks. “Time?”

  “Eleven o’clock.”

  “Morning eleven, is it?” he asked fervidly, if a bit disingenuously, for he must have known it was morning.

  “Yes.”

  “O’clock?”

  The questions, I realized, were just an opportunity to practice his English vocabulary. “Of course o’clock,” I said, “what else could it be?”

  Summarily dropping my wrist, the boy said, “Tchah! Time to go in.”

  As the children began to file back into their classrooms, Sabriye Tenberken came out of the main office building with a white cane in her hand. I introduced myself to her. Her eyes were striking. They were stark blue, clear, deep-set, and, although they saw nothing at all, they were vibrant and healthy-looking. When I spoke, she faced me directly and gazed with such focused concentration she seemed to be not just seeing me but seeing through me. She didn’t look like a person who couldn’t see. She was tall and slender, had an angular, Roman sort of beauty: a high forehead, a long nose that came to a marked point, blond eyebrows, dirty-blond hair, and pale flawless skin. She was dressed in jeans and a red fleece jacket. She spoke fluent English with a German rhythm but very little accent. After asking politely whether I had settled into my hotel (I had), whether I found it comfortable (I did), and whether I was tired after my long trip (I was), she told me that she was just on her way to run an errand and invited me to join her on her walk to the center of the city. She talked a lot and with energy and confidence, and I understood immediately that she is a person who is always busy, that she rarely idles.

  The second thing that struck me about Sabriye was her style of walking. She has notably long legs and walks quickly and with a kind of urgent authority. Indeed, she strides, which was not the gait I expected from a blind person. Apparently accustomed to walking arm-in-arm with companions, she hooked an elbow in mine and, linked in this way, I found that for every step she took I had to take a step and a half. Quickly I understood that on this particular occasion she had linked arms with me not in order for me to guide her, but so that she could guide me.

  I had been in Lhasa less than twenty-four hours, and the city’s high altitude—nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level—and consequent reduced atmospheric pressure had made me breathless, light-headed, and physically clumsy. Not forty seconds into our walk, I stumbled over a pile of granite stones that had been dumped in the middle of the sidewalk. Sabriye, who just at that moment was saying, “People always ask me when did I go blind, ” interrupted herself to steady me, then carefully guided me to the edge of Chingdol Dong Lu, a central four-lane artery on which heavy traffic with an extreme form of disorder unique to China (and India) careered by in both directions.

  Sabriye lifted her chin a fraction, cocked her head in concentration, waited for a break in the two lanes of eastward-rushing traffic, then led me swiftly to
the dead center of the avenue, where, to my dismay, we paused atop the yellow dividing line. Large trucks roared past so close to us that the wind they whipped up tossed Sabriye’s long blond hair across her mouth as she spoke. “But I can never say when exactly I went blind,” she said, the white cane held lightly in her fingers, her voice rising to compete with the noise of the traffic. “It was gradual. I began to realize that a color I thought was green was really blue. I couldn’t see words I was writing. I thought I could see, but I couldn’t.”

  A small break appeared in the two lanes of traffic rushing west, and at just the right moment, Sabriye applied a light pressure to my arm and we plunged forward and crossed safely to the far side of the street. There, without breaking stride, she hopped nimbly over a knee-high barrier that separated the bicycle lane from the rest of the traffic and stepped up onto the sidewalk. She turned left at the next corner, where a woman selling steamed dumplings from a bamboo pot stared at her in astonishment. I could hardly blame the woman, for I too was staring, mystified as to how Sabriye managed to navigate the world so swiftly and flawlessly. She hurried across a vacant lot in which six pool tables had been set up under the vivid blue Tibetan sky, turned slightly left again, went straight for a minute, veered around a pile of rubble, somehow dodged the bicycles blowing past us in the narrow alleys, turned left again, then right. Because our elbows were still linked, I had to maintain a hectic little skipping trot to keep up with her.

  As we barreled up yet another narrow street, a wiry little fox-faced girl sitting on a stoop spotted Sabriye through the crowd, sprang to her feet, and crowed at the top of her lungs, “Xia ze lai le!” A simple Chinese sentence that means, in essence, Here comes an idiot!

  Sabriye repeated the words to herself with a dry laugh and carried on. “Nobody can insult me with blindness,” she said lightly, “because I’m proud to be blind.”

  Almost single-handed Sabriye Tenberken and her partner, Paul Kronenberg, brought literacy to the blind people of Tibet. In founding Braille Without Borders, they inspired nothing short of a revolution in the status of the Tibetan blind, in their thinking, and in their future. She and Kronenberg, who is sighted and handles much of the practical work of the school, were knighted by the Dutch queen and won numerous other honors and awards for their work. Sabriye was hardly an idiot. Nevertheless, in the seven years she spent living in Tibet—and, indeed, in the twenty-seven in her native Germany before that—she had been the object of abuse, epithets, and condescension innumerable times because of her blindness. These days, epithets left her unfazed; they hadn’t always.

  Sabriye was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disease of the retina, and by the age of twelve, she was completely blind. In her early years, she was able to make out faces, colors, even landscapes, but her vision was highly impaired, and as a result her schoolteachers approached her with what she felt was a patronizing deference that set her apart. They always shook her hand first in the morning when the students arrived at school, always offered her the biggest piece of cake at lunchtime. They spoke down to her and singled her out for special treatment because she was blind. Her classmates, by contrast, taunted and ostracized her, played tricks on her, bullied her and deliberately gave her misinformation and false directions in order to watch her tumble down a flight of stairs. They told her she was ugly. Unable to see her own face, she believed the lie. Desperate to fit in, Sabriye denied her blindness even to herself and worked overtime to hide it. At bus stops, she would ask bystanders to read the bus schedules for her with the excuse that she had something stuck in her eye. Or she simply got on the wrong bus, too proud to ask where the bus was going. Out of sheer determination she continued to ride her bicycle long after it was reasonably safe to do so; more than once she and the bike ended up in a ditch. Observing how clumsily she moved, people would ask her if she was drunk. Once, skating on a frozen lake, she skated out of the prescribed safety bounds and fell into a hole in the ice. Sabriye averred that not accepting her blindness made her miserable, for she was constantly compensating and pretending, exhausting herself in the effort. Eventually she met a girl whose vision was approximately as diminished as her own. The girl told Sabriye that she walked with a white cane. When Sabriye said, “A cane is for a blind person,” the girl, who had fully accepted her own blindness, responded, “But I am blind.”

  “Not until I accepted my blindness,” Sabriye told me with visible emotion, “did I begin to live.”

  Sabriye’s parents enrolled her at the Carl-Strehl-Schule in Marburg, a boarding school for the blind where, along with the usual academic subjects, the students were taught horseback riding, swimming, white-water rafting, Braille, and, above all, self-reliance. Suddenly, Sabriye realized that as a blind person she was not alone, that there were many others like her. She made friends. She felt equal and appreciated. She was happy. She learned Braille and for the first time in her life, she read an entire book by herself. She read Dr. Faustus and the works of Shakespeare. She thought, Okay. I may be ugly and blind, but I have a brain. I can do things. It was at this special school for the blind that Sabriye began to learn that her blindness need not be an obstacle, that it need not set her apart from sighted people or cut her off from the world or prevent her from having a happy, fulfilled life. She developed a newfound confidence. At sixteen, at a party, she was invited to dance by a boy who didn’t know she was blind. Before long, the boy asked her if she was having trouble seeing. When Sabriye answered, “I’m blind,” the boy told her that her blindness made him uncomfortable and he stopped dancing with her. Sabriye said to him, “If you have a problem with my blindness, you don’t deserve me.”

  Eventually, Sabriye attended the University of Bonn, the only blind person in a student body of thirty thousand. She majored in Central Asian studies with a particular focus on Tibet. Several professors in the department tried to dissuade her from studying the difficult Tibetan language. No one had yet found a way to translate Tibetan into Braille and therefore there were no Tibetan texts available for the blind. How, then, would she read the assignments? How would she keep up in her classes? How would she make notes on the required Tibetan texts? Sabriye ignored their discouragement and immersed herself in her courses. Using the system of rhythmic spelling that Tibetans employ to memorize their complex language, she created her own method of translating the Tibetan language into Braille. With a specially adapted Braille writing machine, she found she was able to take notes faster than her sighted classmates. She compiled a Tibetan-German dictionary, and when sighted students began asking her for help with their course work, she was vindicated and delighted. Eventually, Sabriye helped to devise a software system that enabled her to transcribe entire Tibetan texts into formally printed Braille.

  Sabriye had developed the system for her own use but when she realized that blind people in Tibet could benefit from it, she got the idea to bring it to Tibet and start a school. In a pattern of skepticism that even now Sabriye faces daily, almost all of her professors told her that her idea was absurd, that although what she had accomplished so far was remarkable, it would be completely impossible for a blind woman to take on such a project. They told her to be realistic, to keep her feet on the ground; they told her not to give false hope to the blind, not to imagine that she, a blind woman, could accomplish something so revolutionary and grand in scope.

  Sabriye ignored the objections. She approached several development organizations for help with founding her school in Tibet, but all of them saw her blindness as too great a liability. After having numerous doors closed in her face, she resolved to realize the project under her own aegis. In 1997, at the age of twenty-six, much to the dismay of everyone but her immediate family, she traveled alone to China, took an intensive course in Chinese, then proceeded to Tibet, where she was surprised to learn that more than thirty thousand of Tibet’s 2.6 million people were blind—about twice the global rate. While poor diet and unhygienic conditions contribute to the high rate of blindness
in Tibet, the main cause is the country’s elevation. At such high altitudes, the sun’s ultraviolet rays are intense and cause damage to the unprotected eye.

  Sabriye also discovered in Tibet a deep prejudice against the blind. Tibetan culture is rife with superstition, mythologies, ghosts, vapors, and spirits. Blindness is rarely considered the result of anything so banal as genetics, disease, or neurological disorders. Most Tibetans believe blindness is caused by mysterious powers or spiritual forces as punishment for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life. The blind are considered to be cursed, possessed by demons, or capable of extrasensory perception, which makes them entirely dangerous; in parts of Tibet, it’s thought that merely touching the blind can cause a person to become impure. For centuries Tibet’s blind have been shunned, vilified, treated as subhuman, and subjected to unimaginable cruelty. When Sabriye first arrived in Lhasa, she found not a single institution or organization geared toward providing assistance for the region’s blind—clearly a result of this deep-seated fear and enmity.