Sabriye decided to travel through remote areas of the Tibetan countryside, visiting rural villages, spreading the word about her Braille system, assessing the situation of blind children there. Many of these villages were not accessible by road, and when Sabriye concluded that the most efficient way to conduct her mission was on horseback, there were more howls of protest from the skeptics. Nevertheless, she set off with three supportive companions, two of whom were Tibetan, and rode from village to village, across high mountain passes, and through flooded rivers. What she found in her investigation shocked her: a small child who, because of her blindness, was tethered to a bed most days, her tiny body withered with misuse; others, barred from the local schools, who regularly had stones thrown at them, who were taunted and jeered at and locked in dark rooms for years on end. Isolated, scorned, sometimes beaten and abandoned or turned out in the streets to beg, almost all were uneducated and completely illiterate.
When villagers saw Sabriye walking and confidently riding a horse and heard her speaking Tibetan, they refused at first to believe that she was blind. With patience and persistence she persuaded them that she was indeed blind and that their blind children also could learn to ride horses, could learn to read and write and speak foreign languages. Gradually comprehending the truth of what Sabriye was saying, one astounded Tibetan father told her, “The prospect of your school is like a dream for us.”
With twenty thousand dollars of Sabriye’s own money and with fierce determination, Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg finally managed to set up a school in a rented building in Lhasa. They began with six students. Six years and a host of trials later, the school now had thirty-seven students in residence, ranging in age from three to nineteen, as well as six trained teachers and five staff members. New students arrived regularly.1 The school charged no tuition or boarding fees; it was a free ride for whatever motivated blind student could present himself at the door. Paul and Sabriye paid the bills by applying for grants and traveling a great deal to make speeches and raise funds from private sources. Against all the odds, Braille Without Borders was a success.
While Sabriye and I walked, the sky had begun to fill with bloated plum-colored clouds. Explosive thunder cracked around us. The Tibetan sky is so close to the ground that the thunder seemed to roll just a few feet above our heads. The noise was huge and crisp and so violent it sounded like a four-poster bed crashing willy-nilly down a long flight of wooden stairs. It rattled the windows of the shops and drowned out our voices. Sabriye shuddered, visibly disturbed by the sound, and for the first time she hesitated in her path.
“I can’t stand loud noise,” she said.
Surprised, I said, “It’s just thunder.”
“Yes, I know. It’s harmless, but I find the noise overwhelming. I hate, for example, construction sites. When I hear a jackhammer, I break into a sweat of anxiety. Noise is my only real fear.”2 She resumed walking and said with a small, self-protective laugh, “The only other thing I’m afraid of is vampires.”
I was sure I had misheard her. “Vampires?”
“Yes. I have a vampire phobia. I hate myself for it, but I have a vivid imagination. Sometimes when I’m walking at night I hear footsteps following behind me and I never care whether it’s a criminal or whatever, because I studied karate and street fighting for a year and a half and I know I can defend myself. But the moment I think, Maybe it’s a vampire, I feel a real panic.”
She blamed the fear on her older brother, who as a child had had a mania for vampires. He knew every last detail about them and insisted on sharing the details at length with Sabriye. At a certain age, the brother began sleeping in a coffin. He watched countless vampire movies on television, and, because he knew that Sabriye was afraid of them, he would force her to watch the movies too. “He loved to go to cemeteries, and sometimes he would bring me with him,” she said. “For him it was a thrill; for me it was absolutely terrible. I loved my brother, but those vampires really scared me.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I wanted to tell her that her vampire phobia was absurd and that her brother sounded like a complete creep. But she was blind, and I was a visitor at her school, and so instead, I said politely, boringly, “Well, I can understand your fear. But do you still think vampires exist?”
After a long silence she said with a smile, “No, I don’t really think they exist. But, you know, Tibetans believe very much in ghosts and spirits. You can easily draw yourself into thinking like that here. I can sometimes believe in ghosts in Tibet.”
Another explosive thunderclap boxed our ears and made us jump. I realized that I was completely lost now in the heart of the city and that I would not have been able to find my way back to the school without Sabriye’s guidance. As we proceeded through the narrow streets, I continued to be amazed by Sabriye’s navigational skills, by how completely assured she was in the back alleys of Lhasa. In the span of forty-five minutes she never once collided with anything or took a wrong turn. Her hands never groped or darted, either investigatively or defensively. She never hesitated or stumbled. She walked in a smooth, gliding way and seemed always to know at what moment to turn left or right. It was like watching an elaborate trick performed by a particularly talented magician. Mystified and amused, I finally asked her how she did it, how she knew where to turn, how she knew she had reached a corner without touching the wall, how she knew when there was a person or a parked truck in her path.
“Well,” she said, “lots of things. Sound, echo, the air, different smells—these things change around you and you know from experience what they are.”
From the way she spoke, it was obvious she’d been asked this countless times before and that for her the answer to my question was so elementary that having to give it yet again was a bit tiresome. She told me she could hear how wide a street was by listening to the echo of her cane tapping on the pavement, how wide a staircase was by clapping her hands or snapping her fingers as she ascended it. “You know,” she said, “sighted friends of mine who knew me well told me I should not come to Tibet to try to take this project on, because when they shut their eyes and see darkness, they feel completely helpless. They couldn’t imagine how I would do it. But for a sighted person who closes her eyes and suddenly tries to live life that way, it’s not the same experience as for a blind person who has had years to adapt and learn and compensate. Sighted people don’t understand that. They don’t understand what the world is like for a person who has long been blind.”
Sabriye went on to observe that most human beings are attracted by beauty, that we make quick judgments about people based on their appearances, but that for blind people this sort of superficial judgment simply isn’t an issue. “A blind person’s reason isn’t clouded by appearances. We have to focus on the personality, which is the real essence of the person. It can be an advantage for us.”
In order to illustrate this point Sabriye sometimes asked sighted visitors to the school to join her for tea in a completely dark, windowless room in the school basement. “We leave the lights off and introduce them to other new people there in the dark. We have tea and conversation, and the sighted people have to make their judgments of these new acquaintances based on what they hear rather than on what they see—it’s all voice, ideas, personality. Then, when we take them outside and they can finally see the people they’ve been sitting with, they’re surprised, because the people look nothing like what they had imagined.”
“It’s not unlike making an assessment of a person just from hearing them on the radio,” I said.
“Right. The radio can be a very intimate and immediate way of knowing a person.”3
I had been watching Sabriye’s face as we walked, reading it for clues. There is in her expression a constant mood of expectation and wry amusement. She smiles easily and speaks with casual directness. She is genial, focused, passionate about her cause, and uses a great deal of visual description. She will tell you that a person blushed, a landscape was beau
tiful, a lake was turquoise, a film she “saw” was frightening. There’s a refreshing lack of performance in her persona, no overweening eagerness to please, no calculation, false intimacy, or apparent guile. She looks directly at you when you speak and listens with an air of such intelligence and alertness that you find yourself regretting you’re not a more articulate, more vibrant person.
When we returned to the school and were passing through the small courtyard, Sabriye stopped at the mastiff’s cage, reached in, ruffled his ears, and greeted him with a few affectionate words of Tibetan. The dog was lying on his side, languishing in the small cage, with his mouth open and his big tongue draped over his jagged molars. “His name is Pookie,” Sabriye said proudly. “Unfortunately we have to lock him up because he’s a little vicious. He bit a Swiss woman who was visiting us.”
The dog struggled heavily up to a sitting position and gazed at us. He had a very large head and opaque staring eyes. I estimated that he was nearly the size of a yak. The bristling mane of hair that grew in a ruff around his neck was not unlike a lion’s. His paws were as big as teacup saucers. I knew that the Tibetan mastiff was considered one of the most ferocious dogs in the world. I did not find it at all unfortunate that he was locked up.
Sabriye said, “Put your hand in the cage and pat him.”
I looked at her to see if she was being funny. It was hard to tell, since she always seemed to have a slightly ironic smile on her face.
“Sabriye,” I said, “do you really think I would be inclined to stick my hand into this dog’s cage when you’ve just told me that he’s a little vicious?”
She laughed. “Don’t worry. He can actually be very sweet. Pat him. You’ll see.”
I crouched down and looked at the dog. The bars of his cage seemed dangerously flimsy. He lifted his eyes at me in a frighteningly noncommittal way. As far as I could tell, he was neither a sweet dog nor a sour one, neither happy nor annoyed to see me. He revealed nothing of his mood or temperament. Our relationship could go one of two ways. “I don’t think so,” I said.
Sabriye laughed again, but this time the laugh had the electrical edge of a cackle to it, an undercurrent of wicked delight. “You’re afraid!” she said. She was clearly amused by my fear, which surprised and interested me. If she could laugh at someone else’s expense, then surely she was fair game for the same in return. When I understood this about her, when I realized that she had just given me permission to tease and push her, I felt for the first time at ease with her. She was not the dreary, pitiable, earnest person that I had persuaded myself all blind people must be. She had, to my surprise, a sense of humor. She tapped the cage with the tip of her cane and goaded me on. “Come on. Don’t be afraid,” she said dismissively. “Just go ahead. He won’t bite you.”
“Being afraid of a vicious dog is entirely reasonable,” I said. “Being afraid of imaginary creatures like vampires and ghosts is not.”
Sabriye laughed loudly at that. “Okay, you’re absolutely right,” she said, relenting.
I put my hand reluctantly into the dog’s cage—ready to retract it in an instant—and patted his big bony head. Nothing happened. The dog didn’t respond, but he continued to gaze impassively at me in a way that seemed ominous. “Good dog,” I said insincerely. The dog blinked once; I withdrew my hand and stood up. “Okay,” I said. “I’ve patted your vicious dog. That’s enough of that. Are you happy now?” My hand felt greasy; I wiped it on my jeans.
“You see?” Sabriye said. “He doesn’t really bite.”
“He doesn’t really bite. Okay, that’s good to know,” I said and made a mental note to steer well clear of him in future.
The Braille Without Borders school comprised two single-story L-shaped buildings that were configured in such a way as to create this pleasant and very private little courtyard. Like most of the buildings in Lhasa, they were made of mud brick and painted white with colorful trim, and every window had at its top that narrow, pleated length of cloth. The courtyard was cloaked in mauve twilight now, and the air had grown chilly enough that I wished I had a hat. Lights had come on inside the school, transforming its many-paned windows into bright rectangles of orange. The smell of roasting yak meat drifted from the school kitchen. The courtyard was empty but for two bigger boys who were laughing as they dragged a sack of cabbages to the kitchen door.
Sabriye invited me to sit with her in her office. As we passed through the school’s small dining room, I saw the boy I had come to think of as the Monk, the one dressed in orange with the buckles on his shoes. He was sitting alone at a table, still worrying his beads, his head bowed and his lips still moving in prayer. There was something extremely remote about him, as though he had no awareness whatever of his surroundings, and I began to wonder if he was not indeed blind and deaf.
As we headed down a hallway, I asked Sabriye about him. “Which boy?” she said moving quickly in front of me.
“The one all dressed in orange. He’s sitting alone in the dining room with a set of beads.”
She slowed her pace a bit and said “Oh” in a grave tone. “That’s Dawa. He’s very new here.”
“Is he praying or just talking to himself?”
“No, he’s praying. He prays constantly.”
“He looks miserable.”
“He is miserable.”
When we sat down in her office, Sabriye explained that Dawa was thirteen years old and had recently lost his vision to some disease, that he was in the classic phase of depression and denial that most sighted people go through when they go blind. He refused to accept that this was his fate, which left him in a limbo of inaction and paralysis. To make matters worse, he had been told by a Tibetan fortune-teller that he might regain his sight, and although that chance was very slim, it was a hope he was desperately clinging to. He prayed constantly to effect this miraculous reversal of fate. “His uncle brought him here, thinking we could help him. He had heard that there were happy blind children here who were learning. But Dawa doesn’t want to participate in anything,” Sabriye said. “I’ve tried to talk with him about it. I told him, ‘Okay, maybe the fortune-teller was right, maybe you will regain your sight. But for now you can’t see, so you might as well do something with that. It can’t hurt you to learn Braille like the other kids.’ But he refuses.”
I told Sabriye that I would certainly feel the same way in his situation, that I would find it impossible to get used to suddenly being blind, and that if I were in Dawa’s position, I would not want to engage in anything at all. She reminded me that she too had gone through the same anger and misery and loathing, said that it was only natural, but that the boy would not really be able to start living until he accepted the fact that he was blind and began to deal with it. “Dawa doesn’t realize that there’s so much he could be doing right now, because he’s placing all his hope in the future and all his value in his eyes.” She shook her head with concern. “It’ll be hard to shake him out of his passivity.”
Sabriye sat back in her desk chair and toyed with the wrist strap on the end of her cane as she spoke. She explained to me that one of the greatest obstacles for blind children, not just in Tibet but everywhere in the world, is that they are seldom treated equally with sighted children, that they are perceived as being helpless, as somehow special and different. “In families and the community beyond, very little is expected of the blind child. This reinforces in them the feeling that they are useless and incapable. Special isn’t good either way. When blind kids come here, we expect something from them. We teach them Braille, Chinese, English, computers, mathematics, and navigational skills. Many who come here have been so neglected and thought so helpless that they don’t know how to wash themselves. We teach them personal hygiene. We expect them to work hard at their lessons, to work hard at communal chores, to help each other out. When they first arrive they object and say, ‘But I’m blind! I can’t do that!,’ because this is what they’ve been taught in their villages: You can’t. You are unworthy.
But when they realize that the other kids here are working and experimenting, being independent and gaining useful skills, they change their views. They begin to see that independence is empowering. That makes them want to work.”
Sabriye told me about a blind girl named Kyila, a recent graduate of Braille Without Borders who was now training to be a masseuse and often helped out at the school. Kyila had grown up in a small village in extreme poverty. Her father was blind and so were her twin brothers. The four of them were perceived as thoroughly useless, not to mention accursed. They were bullied by the villagers and told, “You people might as well all kill yourselves because you have absolutely no future.” Kyila came to Braille Without Borders, studied hard, learned quickly, and had recently won a scholarship to study in England for a year.
“Kyila is brilliant,” Sabriye said, “but nobody in her village ever paid enough attention to her to see that. Now she’ll be one of the first blind Tibetans ever to leave China.”
During the conversation, my notebook had been sitting in my lap. Occasionally I picked it up and jotted something down. This time, when I picked it up and began to take notes, Sabriye said with mock exasperation, “Again you’re writing what I’ve said!”
I looked up at her, alarmed. “How do you know I’m writing?” I said.
“The way you lowered your head.”
“How do you know I lowered my head?”
She shrugged. “I just know.”
“I would only know that you lowered your head by actually seeing you lower it. You couldn’t possibly ‘just’ know. You’re blind.”
Sabriye smiled; she seemed to be relishing the mystery.
For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind Page 4