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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  The Liberian men, of course, had had no exposure to computers and were starting from scratch. The first essay that James typed on a computer looked like this:

  0my personal experiesh on campux;on manuary w

  2 19th 1

  2009 , finding the treasure; on saturday janury 16th,participants of the iise met in the auditorim

  aut auditorim as usual. They were dicv

  divided into four groups. A, v c

  b,c and d to find a hidden treasure on the campux. Pr

  ior to the treasure

  And Johnson’s looked like this:

  Aaa social night a night that vrings eveeeery humanyring toghther to asocial on january twelve came toghther for a dancebraillaaaaaae with out yordersdid this beccause is custonary to dddo in culture echangeto tekll you the ture this was .

  Although there were enormous frustrations in the computer lab, frayed tempers, and wounded pride, and although occasionally one or another student would simply give up and walk out of the room in a snit, they all persisted with the task. They sat at the computers doggedly stabbing at the letters on the keyboards while the electronic computer voices quacked it all back to them. In class, I often read aloud the results of their writing efforts, and they were amused, moved, and delighted by one another’s stories, which inspired them to write more. Sabriye proposed that we publish a school magazine (we called it the Spectacle), and submissions for it poured in.

  During their free time, the students occasionally walked to the bus stop a quarter of a mile down the winding Nemom Po road and caught the public bus into the city of Trivandrum. Of her first shopping trip to the city, Pynhoi wrote in her all-encompassing, sweetly scattered way:

  Marketing When we talk about shoping i am so excited for it , then,i count the things to buy ,i find that i have many things to buy . But when i went to the market i enjoy marketing in different floor because they sold different kinds of thing in every floor ,I also enjoy the stare which take me from the down floor to the top floor it is an electronic machine [escalator],I also enjoyed the bus cause they drived faster,the pinapple juice are really nice to have ,because the weather are hot but a bit expensive ,anyway i like it and i want to have it once more . As we came down to our campus by foot there are no electric as i came down i here different kind of birds and insects are making sounds .and i want some time to go inside the forest to just checked how they sleep but i am so afraied of snake so i desired not to go . When I reach back from the market and checked the things what what I brought from the market I find myself I only bought cream ,biscute ,pepsi .

  Thank you from Pynhoi

  In pouring out his troubles in his first essay, Gyentzen managed with his rudimentary English to express exactly what many of his colleagues had felt in their first few days at the institute. Martin’s eyes filled with tears when he heard Gyentzen’s comments about him:

  tMy first time in the Camp My first day in the Camp is most unforgetable day for me in this year.

  I heard many things about Camp in Kerala from Sbariye and Paul, but i never get feeling like living here. When i first come here i felt really quiet and nothing to do so depressed. In the night what i hear is sound of Birds and some other animal’s sound and couldn’t feel well…at that night i was afraid how to live here in Camp for one year. Because weather was too hot for me and together with i was home sick…and it was also a longest night for me…or i don’t know how to say:

  i had a terrible night at that day and i was thinking of my life in my country and couldn’t sleep whole night. I wake up at the brake of down . But later it was getting better and i had a lots of fun with many different people. I knew there is water which we can swim and there are many place where we can do many defferent things and i went to swim one day witht some of our friends and i had a really nice day. Because sence i went to swim i felt not that hot when i first came here.

  I got very nice guy with me in my room [Martin] and when i feel not happy he tells me lots of joke and always trying to makes me happy to be here. Also he told me we have to fight againest with our trouble.…

  And Khom got right down to the task of instructing sighted people in the ways of the blind with a wry, carefully thought-out essay entitled “How to Behave with the Blind”:

  By Khom Raj Sharma (Nepal)

  If you are meeting a blind or visually impaired (BVI) person for the first time, you may wonder how to behave. The obvious advice is ‘behave normally’. Here are some suggestions:

  Please talk naturally. Don’t talk down or address all your remarks to the person’s companion as though the blind person were not there. Don’t be afraid to say, “Nice to see you,” for blind people say it too. When you approach a blind person and say hello, say who you are in case he or she doesn’t recognize your voice. Address him or her by name, if you know it. If not, a light touch will indicate who exactly you are speaking to.

  Before you move away, say that you are about to leave; anyone would feel foolish talking to an empty space. Persons with blindness and visual impairment may need your help. For example, many blind people appreciate being helped to cross a road or find a shop. If your offer of help is rejected, don’t feel snubbed. The next blind person you come across will probably welcome your assistance. First, ask if you can help. Then walk slightly in front with the blind person holding your arm. If you are helping a blind person to get into a car, say which way it is facing and place the person’s hand on the roof over the open door. If you are guiding a blind person on to a bus or microbus, you should go first. Never push the person in front of you.

  Please inform the blind person if you are approaching a flight of steps or a slope, and always say whether it goes up or down. You should not worry too much about delicate furniture or ornaments, as most blind people move about without leaving a trail of destruction behind them. Show the blind person around the room and describe the furniture as you pass it, mentioning only hazards that are level with the head.

  When a blind person is invited for a meal, he should be informed about the food being served. It is helpful if you describe for the blind the various sorts of food put on the plate in accordance with the location of the hours on a clock. For example: rice in the place of 12, Soup in the place of 3, vegetable in the place of 6, Meat in the place of 9 and so on. The cups or glasses should not be filled to the brim—very full cups are easy to spill. If you are serving a bony piece of fish, offer to de-bone it. Otherwise, your visitor will tell you if any help is needed; usually he or she will manage alone quite happily.

  In class, we corrected the essays together and made suggestions for how to improve them. Class discussions had a way of turning to politics, social injustice, prejudice, ignorance, cultural taboos, ethical responsibility, and the challenges of social change. Students sometimes brought in selections from Braille books they liked and read them aloud. We read the Times of India, which was full of stories of bizarre domestic mishaps, murders, druggings, fatal bus accidents, and imperious letters to the editor about why women should not be allowed into Indian pubs and bars. (This last subject made the women in the class howl with outrage.) I read aloud from Ved Mehta’s autobiography, Vedi, particularly about his experiences as a very young child at the Dadar boarding school for the blind in Bombay, and in the course of reading the story, I realized what an exceptionally good audience they were, how carefully they listened, how deeply they experienced what the words on the page conveyed. They murmured with disapproval and concern when something unpleasant or frightening happened to little Ved; they gasped and cried “Oh God!” in horror when I read that some of the blind children had died because of the poor health conditions at the school; and when they heard that Ved’s mother blamed her son’s blindness on the fact that his uncle had married an evil Christian, they laughed at the absurdity. They listened with complete absorption; the intensity of the expressions on their faces showed that in their minds they were actually living out Ved Mehta’s experiences. Once or twice, Jessie was so rack
ed with suspense that she spontaneously sprang up out of her chair. They enjoyed the story so much that word of it got around, and students who weren’t even in my class began to come and listen. They loved picking up new words, like shiftless and fickle, shabby and relish and shirk, and phrases, like perish the thought, to no avail, and kick the bucket, and as soon as they learned these words and phrases, they began to use them in their daily speech with as much ease as if they had always known them.

  Jayne and Lucy, two young Kenyan women who had gone to college together, were plump and talkative. They both had heavy Kenyan accents and an emphatic, declamatory way of speaking. They spoke Swahili when they were alone together, but their English was perfect. Jayne was a twenty-one-year-old red-haired, white-skinned African albino. When she was born, her face had been as white as the flesh of a banana, but over the years her forehead, cheeks, and lips had become mottled with large brown spots of melanin from overexposure to the dangerous Kenyan sun. Many albinos’ retinas suffer from a lack of protective pigment, and Jayne’s eyesight was extremely weak. She wore thick eyeglasses and spent a lot of time squinting and holding objects very close to her eyes. Although Lucy’s skin was a rich dark brown, her mother was albino, and Lucy had inherited some of the traits of albinism—a large white birthmark under her arm and extremely poor vision. She, too, wore thick eyeglasses. She was twenty years old. Both girls were well educated and politically conscious, and both had come to the IISE because they wanted to start an organization in Nairobi to help improve the dire situation of African albinos and people with low vision.

  One evening at dinner, they explained to me that in Africa, albinos were thought of as ghosts and were therefore believed to be in possession of magical powers. When a woman gave birth to an albino child, it was considered the result of a curse or some other form of bewitchment, and because of this, 70 percent of African albino children were abandoned by their parents. Jayne leaned close to me and said, “Some Africans don’t dare to touch an albino, because they think that our white color is contagious. And lots of people believe that if you come in possession of an albino body part, you will have that albino’s magical power in your control.”

  The high-ceilinged dining room at the IISE, which had a stage erected at one end and which doubled as an auditorium, was noisy at mealtimes. Groups of students and staff members sat at tables scattered throughout the large room, and the sound of multiple conversations, the scraping of chairs on the floor, and the clattering of cutlery crowded the room. I leaned closer to Jayne, the better to hear this strange story. Between forkfuls of rice that she squinted at minutely through her glasses, Jayne went on to tell me that an extremely lucrative black market trade in albino body parts had developed among the African witch doctors. “They kidnap and kill albinos like me so they can cut us up and sell our body parts. The fingers, hair, bones, skin, toes will be used to make magical charms and potions that promise to bring people power, love, long life, fame, and money. Last year in Tanzania, more than one hundred fifty albinos were killed and mutilated. We are hunted, I tell you.”

  Lucy, who had a slow, queenly bearing, a dry sense of humor, and a formal way of speaking, confirmed this fact by exclaiming, “Hey!” Then she put down her fork, drew a freshly pressed white hankie from the pocket of her flowered dress, and gently dabbed her perspiring brow with it. Even the Africans found Trivandrum unbearably hot. Lucy was pretty; she was also deeply conscious of her appearance and dressed with great care and style. That day she wore a blue flowered dress, a white Kenyan cloth wound proudly around her head like a chef’s cylindrical hat, a blue necklace to match the dress, three white beaded bracelets, and a pair of black vinyl knee-high boots.

  Jayne, too, was pretty and fashion conscious, but she was too impatient to spend excessive time on her appearance. She had a slow, forceful, confident way of talking, each word separated definitively from the next, and when she spoke, she never seemed to stop smiling, although sometimes I wondered if it was just her constant squinting that gave her round, speckled face the appearance of perpetual good humor. She had a habit of pedaling her hands up and down before her as she talked, raising her right index finger to hold her listener’s attention, and enumerating facts by tapping the same index finger serially and dramatically against the tips of the fingers of her left hand. When she really wanted you to listen, she leaned close, put the palm of her hand flat against your shoulder, and held it firmly there until her point was made, whereupon she would stop talking, squint beadily at you, and let the hand sweep gently down the length of your arm. Finally, she would lean back and draw the pale hand toward her chest with a flourish intended to fix her words firmly in your mind.

  Jayne told me that it was difficult for her to walk freely in the streets of Nairobi and that few people would want to hire her because she required protection in order not to be kidnapped and killed. She also could not take a job that required that she be outside in the direct sun. “So, my options are limited.”

  Jayne’s mother had abandoned her at the hospital when she was an infant; it was her grandmother who took her home and raised her. “If not for my grandmother, I would be dead,” she said. When she was in grade school, the other children wouldn’t come near her. At thirteen she went to a national boarding school. “Nobody wanted to be with me there either,” she said. “They called me hard words. I was outcast. I was either reading or in the chapel praying. Nobody wanted to sit with me.” All the forty girls in the dorm had to shower together in one big open bathroom. Because Jayne didn’t want them to stare at her white skin, she would wake up in the early hours of the morning, before dawn, shower alone, and then go back to bed. “One day I said to hell with it and I went to the shower with everyone else. As soon as I was naked, the whole school surrounded me and called me names. So I left the showers, put on my clothes, and did not go to class for two weeks.”

  There was one teacher at the school who defended Jayne, but that teacher soon left, and Jayne had to fend for herself. “Some girls would throw themselves in the nearby dam when they were frustrated or had troubles,” Jayne said. “I was thinking to do the same. But I prayed. And I thought, Why should I die because of other people laughing at me?”

  Jayne said that when she walked in the streets of Nairobi, she could hear people saying at the sight of her white skin and red hair, “That is good money passing us by now.”

  “Is it not despicable, Rose?” Lucy said.

  The question needed no answer.

  “They call us ‘walking banknotes,’” Jayne said.

  “And in Kenya,” Lucy said, “they put people like us who have low vision in class with sighted students in school. It is an unfair practice.”

  “It was very hard for us to keep up in a regular sighted class. People with low vision need special facilities. But we had none!”

  “None,” Lucy said. Where Jayne was in the habit of raising her index finger to make a point, Lucy leveled hers sharply at her listener. “We fell through the proverbial cracks, as they say. The totally blind are better off in Kenya, because they get special attention. My mother faced a lot of discrimination because of her white skin and red hair. She worked in a school for visually impaired people. When I was young and could see well, I used to tease the blind children. I used to hide their white canes and dare them to chase me. Catch me if you can and the like! Little did I know then that I also had the gene for blindness. My sight deteriorated, and I had to wear spectacles. I wanted to become an airline pilot. Ha! Of course I could not. An engineer? Could also not. I must confess that when we went to college, we faced discrimination.”

  “Ahhh!” Jayne exclaimed in a confirming way; for Jayne and Lucy, ahhh and hey were completely interchangeable; they were both a form of yes. The two were as close as sisters and sometimes they spoke in contrapuntal harmony; at times, having a conversation with them was like having a conversation with one person graced with two mouths. They finished each other’s sentences, spurred each other on, often dis
agreed for a few moments but then quickly swerved around to agreement again. They were fond of aphorisms and maxims, and occasionally they quoted from the Bible.

  “The teachers told me I could not do science,” Jayne said. “I was good at it, but they did not pay attention. They wrote on the blackboard, but I couldn’t see what they wrote. I needed to hear what they had written, but they would not read it for me. I had to put my chair right up to the blackboard so that I could see the teacher’s writing.”