“Okay,” I said, “we can work on all that later. Please continue.”
“Okay,” Kyila said. “So, because we were blind, my mother had to take care of us. I could not go out and play with other children and was not let to do anything for myself. When I first went to Braille Without Borders I was twelve. I didn’t know how to dress or wash myself already. I had no education.”
At BWB Kyila was delighted to meet other blind students who had had the same experience she had. When she heard that Sabriye, the woman who started the school, was blind, she didn’t believe it at first. “I always thought that blind people couldn’t do anything except eat and sleep.”
After her studies at BWB, Kyila trained to become a professional masseuse. She learned Chinese massage, acupuncture, and physiotherapy. She and a blind friend started their own physiotherapy clinic in Lhasa, and in 2005 she went to England to study English for a year. Her dream was to set up a kindergarten for blind children in Lhasa.
I asked Victor, the oldest Liberian, to introduce himself. He cleared his throat and raised his hands, as if speaking to a congregation from an elevated pulpit. “Good morning, my colleagues. My visionary colleagues, good morning. I am Victor N. G. Gaigai from Liberia, West Africa, and born 1966 unto the blessed union of Mr. and Mrs. Gaigai, who have graciously given birth to fourteen children.”
Victor’s speech was slow and clearer than Johnson’s, but still he had the extremely complicated Liberian accent. He was a big man with the physique of a polar bear: sloping shoulders, a round stomach, and big, solid legs. He walked like an erect polar bear too—flat-footed and tilting side to side, with his big hands swinging. His hair was so short it was like a dark bathing cap on his head. Victor was sweet and gentle, with a polite and ingenuous air, and his hair came to a kind of crest at its top, like a continental divide. He placed his Braille notepad in front of him. “I am a Christian and a family man,” he said. “I have four children. I have been working for the blind in the past ten years at the Christian Association of the Blind.”
Victor explained that as an infant, he had had the measles, and his eyesight was severely damaged because of it. His parents knew nothing about the disease, and whatever treatment they had given him was not appropriate. At the age of nine he got another eye disease. “One morning, I got up from bed with my eyes swollen up and water running down from them. It was a terrible moment in my life. The sickness forced both eyes out of my head and they were hanging on my cheeks for a whole month.”
Not quite believing what I was hearing, I winced, and then, in an attempt at decorum, I tried not to wince, then realized it didn’t matter if I made a horrified face, because nobody but Martin Niry of Madagascar, one of the two fully sighted students at the institute, could see my face that clearly. And Martin too was wincing. And so, in fact, was everyone else. I felt I should say something sympathetic, but Victor was intent on his story.
“Within that time my grandmother died, and I could not cry because of my condition. When my grandaunt came to her sister’s funeral, she met me in agony. She was frustrated and got angry with my parents: Why they could not have sent for her to prevent this?” The grandaunt went into the bush, collected some chalk, mixed it with herbs, rubbed it on Victor’s eyelashes, and soon enough his eyes began to recede back into their sockets. “When they went in,” he said, “they twisted in the sockets and I could not see with my right eye, while the left eye vision was very low.”
This was like something from the darkest of the Grimms’ fairy tales. Martin and I were now grimacing freely at each other. I couldn’t see Victor’s eyes behind his big sunglasses and was extremely curious to know what they looked like now, some thirty years after all that violent upheaval. Victor said dramatically, “After the incident, my future was very bleak! I was the only blind child in the whole town. I could not go to school because there was no blind school in the district.”
When Victor was sixteen, his brother found a grade school for the blind in Monrovia and brought him there. The principal of the school, who was also blind, began to examine Victor with his hands and finally announced that Victor was too tall and too old to attend the school. Nevertheless, he found it in his heart to give Victor a chance. Victor said, “He said he would give me a six months’ grace period to learn and complete the entire Braille course to read and write, or else he would give me NTR: Never to Return.”
Victor was placed in the beginners’ class. I pictured him sitting enormously among the seven-year-old children in the first grade, his big arms slung across a tiny desk. “My colleagues,” Victor said, “the first time I saw Braille I almost gave up because I could not recognize anything. However, I decided to take the challenge to learn.”
Within six months Victor completed the entire Braille reading and writing course. He was tested by the principal, passed, and was promoted to the second grade. His promotions to the next grades came quickly, one after the next, and after three years he was integrated into a regular school. Not long after he entered this school, the Liberian civil war began, and his education came to an end. “I did not go to school for nine consecutive years,” he said. “Instead, I was in our village all those years doing nothing to improve my life.”
Images I had seen from the Liberian civil war passed through my mind. Young boys who had been ordered to take hallucinogens, forced to dress in wedding gowns, and then given machine guns and sent to shoot their parents, part of their initiation into the rebel forces. Images of severed heads, shallow graves, legless children, smashed buildings, charred and grotesquely mutilated bodies.
I thanked Victor and asked James to tell us something about himself. James, sitting next to Victor, smiled and adjusted his enormous sunglasses; the lenses of the glasses were besmirched with thumbprints and greasy streaks. He was a handsome man with even features and a stunning smile that blossomed easily and often. He was dressed that morning in a spotless white dashiki with colorful embroidery sewn around its open collar. “I am James Patrick Johnson, Liberian,” he said. “My brothers and sisters, let me thank God, who granted us traveling mercy for our journeys to this place. I am forty-one years old. Now, James Patrick Johnson, who is he? He was born unto the blessed union of Mr. Jacob Johnson and Wilkie Johnson, may their souls rest in peace.”
James’s parents had been poor farmers. Like Victor, he had lost his sight because of measles. “When I was small,” he said, “I began to see things upside down. When I said this to people, they thought that I was possessed by demons.”
Johnson interrupted James to say, “True! In Liberia, whenever people see a blind person going about his house, they say, ‘Now, this man before me must be dealing in witchcraft. He cannot see, but he moves like a man who sees, finding everything and not bumping into something. So! That is witchcraft. Or it is voodoo!’”
James said in agreement, “They say it is voodoo. And this is why people are afraid to cheat you, if you are blind. They think that you will put a curse on them!”
“The truth!” Victor said. “And sometimes they are afraid to mix a blind man’s money among their own money. So, the driver of a taxi, he refuse to take your money sometime if you are blind. It make you feel bad.”
“It make you feel very bad, I tell you!” Johnson said.
“Brothers!” James said in a rallying way. “This is Lahbeeya! Lahbeeya, oldest country in Africa,” and he went on with his life story. One day, American missionaries who had started a school for the blind in his tribal area found little blind James playing in a coconut plantation. They took him home to his parents and asked if he could attend their school. At the school he learned Braille. Subsequently he studied at the Liberian National School for the Blind, and then he entered a regular high school, where he was the only blind student. He grinned mischievously. “One thing. Because I was blind I had the benefit to use a typewriter to make my notes, and because the girls in my class liked the typewriter, they always sat close to me!” By the time James completed high school, t
he civil war had “ruined the entire country.”
“War has set my country back by fifty years,” he said. James was, at that point, a teacher at the Liberian National Resource Institute for the Blind. He was married and had three children and his dream was to open a computer institute for the blind in Liberia. “When people have some negative feeling about you, you have to do something to change this. When we applied to this IISE, there was a colleague who was supposed to be sending our e-mails to Paul and Sabriye for us. But he did not send our e-mails, because he was jealous that we wanted this opportunity. I thought he had sent them, but he had not. When we learned this, we became so red! But now, thankfully, I am very, very happy to be counted among the participants here at International Institute,” he said, “and thank you very much.”
Sitting beside James was Khom Raj Sharma, a twenty-six-year-old from Nepal. No matter the time of day, Khom always resembled a beleaguered stockbroker just home from a long day’s work. He wore a dress shirt open at the throat, its sleeves rolled up on his hairy forearms. Two days’ worth of beard growth covered the lower half of his face in black velour. His left eye was permanently shut, and all that was visible of the right eye was a sliver of white between its slightly parted lids. Khom had a slow, grave manner and a powerful political conscience. He said in a thick Nepalese accent, “I am Khom Raj Sharma and I am born in 1983 in Nepal. My wife is partially sighted, and we have a baby born six months ago.”
Khom had been completely blind in his left eye from the time he was born, and he lost all vision in his right eye when he was eleven years old. “My village was remote,” he said, “and my family is very poor. There was no one in my family literate before me, so my parents did not know anything about treating my eyes, so I was forced to become blind. If I tried to write something, I would begin at the top of the paper and, because I could not see, the words would fast be falling down to the bottom of the paper. People ridiculed me. And they laughed at me when I was walking on the street because I couldn’t see; they didn’t understand that I was blind. I always said that one day I will contribute to society, even though I am blind.”
Khom went on to say that he studied Braille, and, after meeting people at the Nepal Association of the Blind, he was inspired to advocate for the rights of the blind and disabled. He was disturbed to find that there existed no library for the blind in all of Nepal, which meant that there were no texts available for the education of blind students beyond grade school. He had traveled to the eastern part of Nepal to teach Braille to blind children. After much searching, he found a Dutch NGO to support his digital library project.
Khom said essentially the same thing his classmates had said about the negative perceptions of the blind in his society: the Nepalese people did not believe that blind people were capable of anything. His goal was to establish a training center for the blind and visually impaired in Nepal to help them become independent. He also wanted to run for office. “Advocacy and unity are needed to put pressure on the Nepalese government to make human-rights policies for the blind and other disabled people,” he said. “So, I am lucky to be here with you to improve my knowledge and my skills.”
Holiniaina Rakotoarisoa was next. She was a very pretty young woman from Madagascar, with a gentle, conservative manner, naturally arched black eyebrows, and pale brown skin. Her eyes were the opposite of crossed—her left eye veered toward the left, her right eye steered slightly to the right. That morning Holi was wearing a pink T-shirt that said MADAGASCAR across its front. She told us her story in a French-African accent, pausing now and then to find a word. When she was seven years old, she got a disease that affected her eyes, and because she and her family lived in the countryside, there was no physician to help her. She became completely blind.
I looked around the room. So many of these people had lost their eyesight because they lived in rural areas, had no money, and so could get no medical help. Much of the blindness here could probably have been prevented easily under different circumstances.
Holi leaned forward over the table. “After my parents found a doctor in a town, my sight improved a little bit and now I have some vision. I went to join the blind school in Antsirabe. It was the only primary school for blind kids in Madagascar. After that school, I was integrated into the ordinary school with sighted pupils. At that time I had difficulty in my study, because some teachers did not accept to receive a blind person to study in their school. This is why a lot of blind people become beggars. They can get no education.”
Holi had had difficulty getting the study aids she needed to keep up in a class of sighted people. At university, her teacher would not allow her to use her Braille typewriter to take notes because the noise of it disturbed the other students. She was forced to spend what little money she had on a tape recorder, cassettes, and batteries. Because many of the books and documents for her courses were not available in Braille, she needed someone to accompany her to the library and read them aloud for her. “Sometimes, if my friends were not available, I had to pay someone else to read for me. It was costing me a lot of money to study.”
Holi stopped there and looked at her hands. From watching Holi walk and seeing how she came up to me when she wanted to ask me something, I knew that her vision was minimal. There was caution in the way she approached a door, a painstaking slowness in the way she located an object on a table.
“Sometimes I feel sad when I have difficulty in my life,” Holi said. “But I am proud of myself when I am successful. We have in my country humans’ rights. But the rights for disabled people has not come yet. I have decided to make a project for the visually impaired people in my country and help them so they will not be dependent on their families. And so that is my story.”
Sitting beside Holi was Martin Niry, also from Madagascar. Martin was a fully sighted man of thirty. He was thin, shy, and boyish-looking, with a serious face, a patient, observant air, and a heavy French-Malagasy accent. He explained to us that he had worked for ten years as an educator for the blind and also in Braille book production. He had taken training courses in blind education in South Africa and Tanzania, and his goal was to work in management of social organizations geared toward services for the blind. He was married and had a young son. “It is not easy to discuss education for the blind in a place like Madagascar,” he said. “The education of disabled kids is not really supported by the government. It’s mostly private associations and foreign NGOs that take a responsibility for them. The best thing I can do is to encourage Malagasy people to think differently about these issues. And that is why I came here to work with all of you and learn better skills. And thank you for giving me a place here.”
The last student to introduce himself was Marco, the only student from South America. Marco was forty years old, extremely intelligent and hardworking. Like Khom, Marco had a calm, mature manner and strong political feeling. He was short but had the powerful chest and shoulders of a welterweight boxer. His large face was pale and square, and his eyes were hidden behind square dark glasses that resembled the protective eyewear worn in a chemical laboratory. Marco had a notable underbite and such pronounced eyeteeth that when he smiled, he slightly resembled an English bulldog. His hair was similar to Gyentzen’s—dark black, extremely thick, and cut short so that the natural grain of its growth was visible, not unlike a bear’s pelt. I had already discovered that although Marco’s speech was slow, he had an obsessive passion for the English language and had acquired an impressive English vocabulary. He was in the habit of using words like querulous and banish, ameliorate and importune. Most of what he knew he had learned from the Voice of America and BBC radio. He never let an unfamiliar word go by without asking what it meant or looking it up in his dictionary.
“I am Marco Tulio Benavides,” he said. “I am from Colombia. I am married and have one teenage son. I was born blind and my sister was also. My parents, who were illiterate and poor, thought there was no hope for us, and so they went to church and made a Mass
with the prayer that my sister and I would die.”
To make a Mass means to request, often with a donation of a sum of money, that a priest will celebrate the Mass with a particular intention in mind. I could not imagine that any priest, no matter how corrupt, would be willing to wish death upon a pair of infants and concluded that Marco must have meant that his parents had expressed this prayer in their own hearts.
When Marco was seven years old, his aunt declared that she would take the boy and try to find a cure for his blindness. No cure was found. The aunt encouraged him to study at an institute for the blind, which he did, and when his studies were completed, he returned to his parents’ home. “Though we had no money, and there was a lot of discrimination against me,” he said, “I was the first blind student to attend and successfully complete the regular primary school education in my town. After a long struggle I got accepted in a regular secondary school.”
Marco’s classmates at the regular school mocked and taunted him because of his blindness, and their parents complained to the school administration that a disabled child should not be sharing classes with their normal children. “I had difficulties in socializing and getting friends,” Marco said, “so most of the time I was alone in the school yard at break time.”
Gradually, people realized what a good student Marco was, and they began to change their opinions about him. But good student or no, when he finished school and applied for jobs, he was rejected everywhere because of his blindness. He ended up washing plastic bottles and selling raffle tickets on the street in order to make enough money to support his wife and son. Eventually he was hired as a part-time teacher of the blind, and he and some other blind adults formed an organization in aid of local blind people. “We managed to get funding to provide educational materials for the blind—Braille paper, Braille slates, white canes, tape recorders, cassettes, radios, and other useful things. But still, there is so much more we need to accomplish in my country. And so I am here, like the rest of you, to learn how to continue this work more efficiently.”
For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind Page 19