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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  Though I knew how well Sabriye navigated and knew how many times she had been on this road, I was a little nervous. The road narrowed quickly, and eventually the surface changed from pavement to dirt. It was riddled with potholes and many small stones. I had walked here once already and knew that a family of mean turkeys lived not far up the road, turkeys who had a propensity to chase human beings and even try to bite them. And there were dogs here, mangy, starved-looking wild dogs with staring black eyes and sharp teeth. And I was certain we had a flock of those creepy bats following us—I could fairly feel them stirring the air above my head. “I really can’t see a thing,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I know every inch of this road.” Sabriye explained that she couldn’t really get turned around here because of the breeze that generally blew in off the lake. If she could feel the breeze on her cheek, she knew where the lake was, and if she knew where the lake was, she knew in which direction she was headed. The same was true of the sun: If she knew what time it was and felt the sun shining at a certain angle on her face, she knew what direction she was facing.

  I asked Sabriye what prevented her from walking into the barbed-wire fences and coconut trees that lined the road.

  “I can sense them. It’s a kind of echo that they make. I know when an object is in front of me.”

  “How could a barbed-wire fence make an echo?” I said.

  She assured me that it somehow did, that she could not just hear but feel its presence like a vibration, and that she had been on this road so many times that she knew where every object and pitfall was. I could hear the tip of her white cane occasionally tapping the earth. Three years before, when I visited her in Tibet, Sabriye had explained to me that the white cane was useful not simply because it came in contact with obstacles before its user did but also because the sound the cane made from one situation to the next revealed a great deal of information. The sort of echo the tapping cane made would tell the user what kind of space she was in. She could determine from the quality of the echo not just that a street was lined with houses but whether the houses were made of stone or of wood, could tell whether a street was bordered by trees or shrubbery, degrees of subtlety that could come only with long hours of practice. Some blind people don’t like to use the white cane, feeling that it too loudly brands them as blind and helpless. Sabriye, though, was the cane’s strongest advocate. She carried her cane wherever she went. Sighted people unfamiliar with the purpose of the white cane sometimes asked her in her travels if she was a shepherd, or if the stick was a piece of skiing equipment or perhaps a device for detecting land mines.

  We walked silently for a bit, listening to the sound of our own footsteps on sandy gravel, the rustling of creatures in the underbrush at the side of the road, the occasional hoot or wail of a bird. Kerala’s darkness of night—the deepest darkness I’ve ever experienced anywhere—could not completely still the impulses of its remarkably robust wildlife, a wildlife I had begun to familiarize myself with with some alarm. Before coming here I had done a little research about the area and was not heartened to read this:

  All the major venomous species of snakes found in India are also found in Kerala. Kerala is recognized as having a major problem with snakebite. The five common poisonous snakes found in Kerala are Indian Cobra, King Cobra, Russel’s Viper, Saw-scaled Viper and Krait. Out of these, Indian Cobra, Russel’s Viper, Saw-scaled Viper and Krait are the most dangerous, since King Cobra usually habits in dense forests and hence rarely comes in contact with humans.

  I understood this to mean that in Kerala, there was no question but that I would come in contact with four out of these five species of venomous snake, to say nothing of Kerala’s many species of nonvenomous snake, which I was no more eager to meet.

  Trailing slightly behind Sabriye, lightly tugged along by the crook of her elbow, I said a bit breathlessly, “We won’t meet any snakes, will we?”

  Sabriye did not exactly assure me that we wouldn’t meet a snake but said that if we did, it would probably be a rat snake, and that would be all right because rat snakes were not poisonous and therefore not dangerous. “But rat snakes are big,” she added. “And if they bite you, you bleed a lot.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes, but usually you don’t die.”

  I remained silent after that. I didn’t want to hear any more. I was by now familiar with Sabriye’s nonchalance, her directness, her sense of humor, and her habit of extreme understatement, all of which I generally appreciated. But that night I struggled to contain my feelings of reluctance as she dragged me stumbling up the road.

  We arrived at the house, and Sabriye led me inside and set about making me a cup of tea. The house was typical of many in the area, a surprisingly modern construction probably not more than ten years old, two stories high, with a well-appointed kitchen, a dining room/living room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a driveway, and a carport—a brightly painted, suburban sort of house in the middle of a coconut jungle.

  We sat at a table drinking our tea, talking about her and Paul’s plan for the school year ahead. I noticed that Sabriye’s bare ankles were flecked with mosquito bites. The yellow baseball cap on her head sat slightly askew and her long blond hair was a bit jumbled beneath it. As attractive as Sabriye is, her appearance is probably the last thing on her mind. Most days she dresses casually in jeans and a T-shirt. When she dresses up for an occasion, the transformation is stunning. Tonight she looked tired but happy.

  Sabriye and Paul Kronenberg had been working nonstop for several years to make the IISE in Kerala a reality. The first students had already arrived, and the rest would be arriving within a few days. I could feel Sabriye’s satisfaction and excited anticipation. Even at her most relaxed, she has an intense way of speaking—the words spill out of her with an urgency and a clarity of enunciation that grabs the listener by the earlobes. This, combined with the musical strength of her voice, makes it nearly impossible not to pay attention to what she’s saying.

  That night she spoke of their goals here, their desire to help other blind and socially motivated people realize their dreams of improving the lives of others, of making a contribution to society. She told me that her parents were artistic and that when she was growing up they always had a lot of artistic people in the house, which made for a rather chaotic atmosphere. “There were a lot of big talkers around us. They didn’t do much, but they talked a lot. My parents started a school for creative arts in Germany. They opened their house to the public, and that opened my mind to another way of looking at things. When I went blind, I went from being popular to being an outcast. Nobody wanted to sit next to me in school. I became very angry. There is a word in German: wut. It expresses an anger like outrage. It’s a productive kind of anger.”

  Sabriye referred—as she often does—to the high school for the blind that she attended in Marburg, Germany, to the impact it had on her, and to the confidence she learned there. “The special thing about that school,” she said, “was that the teachers didn’t overprotect the students. They said, ‘You may be blind but you still have a talent and a brain, and you have dignity.’ The important thing was confidence, and how to deal with your own blindness in a humorous way.”

  Beyond the walls of that school, Sabriye faced discrimination. Even her friends told her she couldn’t accomplish much because of her blindness. In Germany, the legally blind are entitled to a government stipend of five hundred dollars a month. Sabriye felt that the blind didn’t need subsidies, that all they really needed was equal rights. “Blind German people study at university,” she said. “They have degrees in everything. But seventy percent of them are unemployed because of prejudice. People don’t like change. The status quo is comfortable. German people are very conservative, and the German blind are still suffering from the attitudes of the Third Reich. We are still seen as worthless, as a burden to society. It’s all still there. Younger Germans are interested in these issues but the older ones are happy to just sit and drin
k their beer.”

  On the advice of one of her teachers, when Sabriye finished university, she decided to go into development work. She wanted to travel and be useful to others, to use her talents and get her hands dirty. She approached the Red Cross and Caritas to see if they would employ her; their response was Don’t do this to us. We don’t have insurance to cover you. “Sighted people tell the blind, ‘You cannot do it,’ but they only say this because they cannot do it. My feeling was, if they won’t send me into the field, I’ll start my own organization and send myself. So I’m blind. So what?”

  Once Paul and Sabriye had gotten the Braille Without Borders school in Tibet on its feet, they wanted to start a center for people who had what Sabriye called “big dreams,” a center for the blind where no one would say no to their ambitions of social entrepreneurship. They chose India because it is geographically central to the world’s developing countries, from which the student body would be drawn, and because the Indian health care system is good, and because India’s population is relatively well educated. The participants in the program would spend a year learning the skills necessary to found and run a not-for-profit organization: management, leadership, communication, budgeting, fund-raising, bookkeeping, public speaking, writing, advertising, marketing, hiring, and computer proficiency. They wanted not just to teach these skills but to create a think-tank where the exchange of ideas among the participants would be the guiding force. They would accept sighted people as well as blind, as long as the applicants had conviction and strong intellectual social vision. They had hired some twelve or thirteen people to help them run the program, including housekeepers and a kitchen staff. The student body for the coming year would number twenty-four in all. They would live together in the dormitory, two to a room—women on the second floor, men on the first. This was a very different arrangement from the school Paul and Sabriye were running in Tibet and would be a new challenge for them. Tibetan children required one kind of attention and one set of guidelines; blind and visually impaired adults from thirteen different countries required something entirely different. The IISE was a bigger property, and the cost of transporting, feeding, housing, and educating the participants would be roughly 6,500 euros per student; the total cost of running the institute would be 170,000 euros that year.

  Eventually Paul joined us at the kitchen table. He is a tall, slender, blond-haired, blue-eyed Dutchman with a film star’s evenly sculpted features. See him from the corner of your eye and for a moment you might think he’s Ralph Fiennes. An extremely hardworking, passionate, and dedicated man, Paul has a zeal for their projects that is palpable. He is a storyteller who feels things deeply, shows his emotions freely, and can be moved to cry by a particularly poignant story—his own or someone else’s. Paul confessed that night that he’d been working so hard and sleeping so little he had lost weight. I saw that; I saw that his clothes hung more loosely on his frame than they had in Tibet, and that his eyes were reddish from lack of sleep.

  Paul’s ambitions and talents are varied, but he is particularly knowledgeable and passionate about architectural design and its relationship to the natural environment. It was he who designed most of the buildings on the Braille Without Borders farm in Shigatse, Tibet, and with results that are extremely pleasing to the eye. Having raised enough money through grants and donations to buy the land here at the edge of the lake and fund the construction of the institute, Sabriye and Paul felt strongly that their first task was to design a campus that was as environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and energy efficient as possible. They were as concerned and idealistic about the future of the earth’s ecology as they were about the future of humanity—concerns and ideals that obviously go hand in hand. Paul said, “We feel that when we try to change things for blind people worldwide, we should also work on changing something about the environmental approach. If you set up a project like this, you also have to build it in an environmentally friendly way.”

  Paul and Sabriye were inspired in part by the British architect Laurie Baker, who went to northern India in 1945 to build practical, low-cost hospitals for lepers. Baker believed that poor people didn’t have to live in poor conditions, and he demonstrated that it didn’t take a lot of money to build a pleasant house. He became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi, who embraced Baker’s approach, and when most foreigners were asked to leave India after independence, Gandhi invited Baker to stay and continue his work. In the span of sixty years, Baker designed and built many houses and public buildings around the city of Trivandrum—practical, low-cost, and aesthetically pleasing structures. Rather than impose modern, foreign architectural methods on his constructions, Baker embraced the indigenous traditional practices and simply modified them.

  “Baker’s first concern was low cost,” Paul said. “But the style he chose was also good for the environment. We followed that style because we want to show people that it’s possible to live in harmony with the environment.”

  The first rule of this sort of construction was that the building materials should come from within a fifteen-mile radius, which decreased not only transportation costs but also energy consumption and the resultant pollutants. The four main campus buildings at the IISE were made of recycled materials and locally manufactured brick and tile. Paul and Sabriye deliberately installed air-conditioning only in the computer lab, where it was necessary to keep the equipment from overheating. Otherwise, all the buildings were cooled in a natural process: Portions of the walls of the campus buildings were constructed in the jali design, in which the bricks were arranged to make a pattern of gaps in the wall, allowing air to enter at the lower parts of the building, rise naturally, and then exit through similar gaps at the top of the building, causing a cooling circulation and giving the buildings a pretty, whimsical aspect that no other buildings in the area possessed. In addition, all the campus buildings were graced with balconies and large windows.

  Paul began to speak about toilets and waste management. “In the West, we use water toilets,” he said. “It’s not a very environmentally friendly method. Ecosan is a movement aimed at getting rid of our waste in a more efficient and less harmful way. If you mix urine with feces you get a worse smell than if the two are kept separate. The ecosan toilet separates them.”

  The toilet in my dorm room, like all the toilets at the institute, was an ecosan toilet. I had seen for myself how the separation worked. The toilet bowl was, in a sense, two bowls—smaller at the front, larger at the rear. If you sat on the toilet seat, a lever was pressed that opened a drain at the bottom of the front bowl of the toilet where the urine was collected. The urine, without added water, would drain to a tank outside the dorm building. When you stood up, that pipe would close so that when you flushed the toilet, the water was prevented from escaping through it and would carry only the feces out the back side of the toilet to a separate bio-gas tank, where it would be transformed into fuel.

  “Urine added with a little bit of water can be used to water trees and plants, and it acts as a fertilizer,” Paul said. “And the feces is working to create a source of energy. So, every time you go to the toilet you feel good because you’re adding benefit.”

  Sabriye snickered at the idea.

  “We hope that we can find manufacturers within India who’ll start to make these toilets.”

  They were hoping to purchase two windmills for the campus in order to generate their own electricity and were also planning to harness solar energy. “We want a solar-powered boat for our participants to use on the lake. One drop of gasoline pollutes billions of liters of water, and a gas engine is noisy. A solar boat is quiet, doesn’t pollute, and runs on the energy of the sun.”

  Whenever he makes a statement like this, Paul presents his hands palms upward to show the sense and simplicity of it all and then he looks you in the eye and smiles like a man who has just won the lottery. “Our solar boat will be the first ever in Kerala.”

  “So you’re not just educating blind people,” I s
aid. “Your entire way of life is a kind of example of how we can save the environment and ensure a sustainable future.”

  Perhaps anticipating skepticism, Sabriye said, “People scoff at us all the time. They tell us we’re too idealistic, that our dreams are beyond our reach, that one person can’t change the world. One person can’t change the world, of course, but many people working together can. If one person shows another what can be done and that one shows another and each one takes a responsibility for his own way of life and does his part, the world does change.”

  “We built a concrete housing system for the storage of rainwater,” Paul said. “We didn’t really need it, because we have the lake water, but we did it to show people that you can collect rainwater in dry places and store it underground for later use. It’s an example.”

  Sabriye laughed. “The local people saw the storage tanks and were convinced we were going to use them to store alcohol.”

  “Alcohol is taboo here,” Paul said and went on to explain that the local people living near the school kept a curious and sometimes suspicious eye on their progress as the institute was being built. Not sure what to make of this foreign presence and its unprecedented construction in their dozy little community, the locals seemed to feel envy, fear, and excitement. When the peripheral wall of the campus was constructed for privacy, some neighbors tried to break it down, protesting that part of the land it was enclosing belonged to them. Paul had had to do a great deal of explaining and appeasing to keep the peace. “I tried to get them to see that we can all work together and that everyone could benefit from our presence. I told them, ‘The fact that we’re here could be good for you. For example, we can buy the vegetables you grow in your gardens for our kitchen,’ but they were wary.”

  The area was ruled by labor unions with an extremely territorial grasp. By law, any goods delivered to the institute had to be unloaded by union workers only. “You can’t even unload deliveries on your own private property,” Paul said with exasperation. “You have to let the union men in and pay them to do it.” Whenever the union men saw a truck heading down the road toward the institute, they ran after it to ensure that the job of unloading it was theirs. If private individuals tried to unload the goods themselves, the union men could become aggressive, even violent. “We’ve had plenty of difficulties, but we’re so lucky to be here,” Paul said.