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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  I labored to explain all this to Aias. I labored to explain that there are as many different kinds of blindness and experiences of blindness as there are blind people in the world, that anyone can go blind but not everyone is capable of embracing the blindness and allowing it to blossom. I realized from the skeptical look on Aias’s face that I was probably laboring in vain. I was failing to persuade him of things of which he had no knowledge or experience. Helen Keller understood the immensity of this task when she wrote, “It is more difficult to teach the ignorant to think than it is to teach an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara Falls.”

  That evening, a particularly hot one, I went to Victor’s dorm room to remind him that I wanted him to practice his English pronunciation. I had read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” into a tape recorder for him and told him that I wanted him to memorize it and repeat it until he could recite it well enough that any English speaker in the world could recognize the words. Victor liked and understood the poem. I had realized that all three Liberians had difficulty, among their other elocutionary difficulties, in pronouncing the letter w. In fact, they did not pronounce it at all; they simply dropped it completely. Victor’s initial attempts at the first line of the poem had sounded something like this: “Ooze oods deez ah ah fick ah noah.” The ending had sounded like this: “Ah mah to go befoh ah zlip.”

  Victor and Johnson, his roommate, were sitting at their desks writing with their Braille slates while James, wearing nothing but shorts, lay on the floor directly beneath the cooling air current generated by the ceiling fan. James had a pillow tucked under his head and his arms crossed on his chest. Because the men were sitting in the dark, I asked their permission to turn on the light. Victor stood up and hit the light switch, and then I realized that they had all removed their big sunglasses. Johnson’s eyes watered incessantly, and occasionally he wiped them with a finger. I could see a deep scar just above his right eye. James rarely removed his glasses, and he looked to me almost naked without them. He kept his eyes closed most of the time. Victor’s eyes were clear, but one of them wandered freely.

  “Victor,” I said, “have you been practicing your pronunciation the way I asked you to do?”

  He lifted a tape recorder on his desk and held it toward me. “I have been doing it.”

  Before I could ask him to recite the poem, James said from the floor, “He has been doing this, Auntie Rose, too many times: Ooze oods deez ah ah fick—”

  I said, “Whose. Say it, all of you.”

  In unison they said, “Ooze.”

  “Whose!”

  “Wooz!”

  “Okay,” I said. “Say hooze.”

  “Yooz.” James began to snicker nervously, but suddenly Victor hit on it. “Whose wooz deez ah ah fick—”

  “Think.”

  “Tink.”

  “Th.”

  “Ss.”

  We went on that way for quite a while, and finally I said, “Just keep listening to the recording. But really listen to what you’re hearing and try to imitate the sounds.”

  Victor asked me if I had read a recent essay he had written about his life in Liberia. I had read it and told him I found it very interesting and urged him to write more. He looked surprised and pleased. “Auntie Rose, really you think I should write more?”

  “I think you should all write more about yourselves,” I said.

  James sat up on the floor. “Even me?”

  “Yes, even you. Your stories are always interesting.”

  Johnson said, “And what about me?”

  “Of course you.”

  These three men had grown up in extreme poverty, and in their teens they had been subject to a terrible civil war, had been present when Liberian rebels committed unimaginably gruesome war crimes. They had had close friends and relatives murdered in front of them. Johnson’s aunt had been shot. A friend of his was forced at gunpoint to rape his own aunt. He had seen small children being thrown into a deep well to drown. He had seen a pregnant woman being harassed by rebels and then, when she could not tell them whether her unborn child was a girl or a boy, heard one rebel say to another, “Let’s find out.” They cut the woman’s belly wide open with a knife and announced “It’s a girl!” as the woman lay dying. Johnson had been invited to eat boiled human flesh by some of Charles Taylor’s soldiers. When he refused to eat, the soldiers said, “If you don’t, we will cook you too.” Despite all the terror and upheaval in their lives, the Liberian men were among the gentlest, most empathetic, and most respectful people I had ever met. They had not been hardened by their experience or filled with crippling resentment and anger. I was surprised to learn that evening that at that moment, their greatest concern was that they felt out of place at the IISE. They felt unprepared for the work that was expected of them and woefully inexperienced with computers as compared to their classmates, and they worried that their writing skills were seriously lacking because of their interrupted education. They felt, above all, that the ambitions they had had for their future work when they first arrived were ridiculously simple and modest compared to the grand ambitions of their classmates. Their classmates planned to found entire schools and social organizations; the Liberians had come here expecting to learn how to repair Braille typewriters so they could open a repair shop when they went home—they wanted to learn to do small, simple things so that they could find a way to make a living. Now they understood that typewriter repair was not something that would ever be taught at an advanced organization like this, and they were concerned that they were too far behind the others and that their ideas about their future were perhaps not entirely respected. I understood what they were telling me. They had come from nothing and now, beside the others who were generally well educated and had had better opportunities, they felt that they didn’t fit in.

  I explained to them, truthfully, that this idea existed only in their own heads and assured them that there was not a single person at the institute who looked down on them, that their ambitions, however small, were as worthy as anyone else’s, and that their obvious intelligence and their concern for their compatriots would carry them far in their efforts to improve the lives of other blind Liberians. “Most big things start small,” I said. “Many other applicants wanted the three places that you are occupying and didn’t get them. The fact that you’re here means that Paul and Sabriye found you worthy. It also means that you care to use your lives in the service of other people. It’s not a competition. Your intention is what’s important. It’s all you need to get you started. Please don’t be discouraged. Just take what you can from what you’re being offered here and use it as best you can.”

  They sat, listening, as the ceiling fan chopped at the air above us. Johnson finally said, “Auntie Rose, seventy thousand people were blinded in the Liberian civil war.”

  Johnson affirmed this: “Seventy thousand!”

  “So,” I said, “there are a lot of people who need your help.”

  “What can we give them?” James said.

  “Plenty. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to use a computer yet or spell perfectly or whether you can put a comma in the right place. The only thing that matters is what’s in your heads. Just keep working and soon enough the answer will come to you,” I said.

  James said, “Nobody in Liberia would speak to us like that.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  Victor said, “Nobody would encourage us.”

  One evening at dinner I sat at a table with Pynhoi and Hossni. At fifty-two, Hossni was the oldest student at the institute, and because of this, the others had taken to calling him Daddy. He was plump, serene, and very sweet. He was Indonesian but had lived in Saudi Arabia for years. He was a devout Muslim who prayed every day, dressed in Saudi gowns, and on special occasions wore a full Saudi headdress. Hossni’s round face was almost pretty—he had fine lips and delicate features and a naturally Asian cast to his Indonesian eyes, which were deeply obscured by e
xtremely thick eyeglasses. Like Pynhoi, Hossni could barely see. He had gradually lost most of his eyesight to a degenerative disease, and at the point that he was no longer able to continue his job because of it, he fell into a deep depression. Like many people who lose their sight as adults, Hossni found it impossible to admit to himself that he was effectively blind. He suffered a kind of paralysis of will and simply stayed at home feeling sorry for himself until one day he heard an advertisement on Saudi radio for an organization that offered training for the visually impaired. Hossni enrolled in the class, and during his seven months of training, he was astonished to discover how many blind people in his country were unemployed. Hossni was here at the IISE because he had resolved to set up his own training center for blind and visually impaired people eager to enter the profession of medical massage. Hossni’s center would be the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia.

  Hossni had a wife and three daughters back in Saudi Arabia. He referred to them all as “my sweethearts.” That evening at dinner he told Pynhoi and me a bit about them, and Pynhoi squinted delightedly at him as he talked. His love and pride were palpable.

  “Hossni,” Pynhoi said, “you are a good father!”

  Hossni, who was exceedingly modest, blushed and shrugged.

  Pynhoi declared that her own father was also a good father and that although he did not know how to read or write, he was very intelligent. “He used to play a wooden flute and he could make music from a piece of grass.” Pynhoi told us how much her parents loved animals, even though they had to kill and eat them to survive. When Pynhoi and her family were living in a village, a baby monkey got into some rice reserves and ate them. “The village people, they catch the baby monkey and tease him and torture him, and when my mother and father see this, they cry. They really cry, because all of the creatures belong to God. The people, they also used to tease me because I could not see, but my father and mother always say to them, ‘You tease this girl, but she is not a stupid girl and one time she will be the one supporting the whole family!’”

  Pynhoi sipped from her glass of water and then placed her arms flat on the table. She rearranged her glasses on her nose and said to Hossni, “My father was proud of me like you are proud of your girls.” Pynhoi’s father had died when she was seventeen. “The thing that is so sad,” she said in a wondering way, “is that his life just ended.”

  Pynhoi told us that her mother and father would grind rice and sell it once a week in the market. Eventually Pynhoi’s father had taken to sitting with the men in the market and gambling with them. He began gambling when Pynhoi was quite small, and she would sit on his shoulder and watch. “And then,” Pynhoi said, “he drink some alcohol with them sometime. He would be drunk, and if my mum don’t give him money for the alcohol, he scold her. But we did not have enough to eat and my mum was pregnant and we had a bad time. Sometimes my mum, she cook the rice and she don’t give him any because he spend up all the money. But even though he is drunk, my father never hit my mom. Sometime she used to run and sleep in the forest to get away from him when he is drunk and scolding.”

  Pynhoi was such a cheerful person and seemed so happy to be alive that even as she told this story, the expression on her face and the exuberance in her strong voice had the effect of making one think, This story is not as bad as it sounds. It was difficult to feel terribly sad or concerned in the presence of that beaming little face, no matter what she was saying.

  Pynhoi’s father died when she was in the middle of her exams at a Catholic boarding school. “I was not with him, but I feel it in my body,” she said. “That night I dream a fire came from the river and I say to my family, ‘Get up and run from this house,’ and soon as the fire from the river touch my father, he die in my dream. But really when he die they lied to me. They told me, ‘Your father, he is only in the hospital.’ But then when I went home they told me he is really dead.”

  “But what happened to him?” I said.

  “He get drunk and my mom open the door and he went out. And next time later my mom she go out again and he was on the ground dead. He has vomit on his face. They all said that earlier that day he talk a lot about me and he make me a basket out of bamboo.”

  Pynhoi’s smile had fled her face. She looked terribly worried, which was so uncharacteristic it made me feel worried. Hossni, too, looked extremely concerned. Pynhoi picked up her unused knife and fiddled with it. “I used to say to him, ‘Don’t drink, Father,’ because when I used to come home from the boarding school he used to be always drunk, falling down this way and that way. I say to him, ‘Why you so drink, Father?’ He didn’t help us, he was only drinking all the time and at night he opened all the doors and windows and you could see the night.” Pynhoi threw her arms wide to illustrate exactly how her father opened the doors and windows, and I could almost envision the night view from the open door of their straw hut. “I say to him, ‘If you drink again more I will not come home from the school to see you.’ The only time I saw my father cried was when I told him I would not come home from the school again to see him.”

  Pynhoi stopped speaking. She held her dinner knife to within an inch of her eyeglasses to look at it. She studied it a long time, perhaps making out a small reflection of her own eye in the blade. Her face had utterly changed. Her expression was one of puzzlement and pain. She said, “My father, he cry. He say to me, ‘Pynhoi, please come home to see your family. You do not have to come to see me.’”

  Pynhoi put down the knife and began to cry. She slid her chair back, put one arm on the edge of the dinner table, laid her forehead on it with her face parallel to the floor, and sobbed. Hossni looked stricken. I’m certain that I did too. Hossni and I sat in shock for a full ten seconds, staring at this paragon of good cheer suddenly so overwhelmed with grief. I could see the tears dropping from Pynhoi’s eyes and falling into the cupped lenses of her eyeglasses. She choked back the tears and spluttered at the floor, “I am sorry I am cry.” I put my hand on her heaving back and told her that I could completely understand why she was upset, that she should not apologize for crying. Hossni also tried to comfort her. Eventually Pynhoi sat up, wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, and confessed that she felt very guilty talking about her father this way.

  “You don’t have to feel guilty,” I said. “If it was true, it was true. It doesn’t mean your father was a bad man. Everybody has weaknesses and failings. And it doesn’t mean your father didn’t love you.”

  Pynhoi said, “Yah, Rose, I know my father love me.”

  “And you loved him too, right?”

  She smiled. “How much!”

  Pynhoi told us that her mother was now working as a laborer, hauling bricks for a mere fifty cents a day.

  I had always believed that a sudden inability to see the world would be the most horrendous thing that could ever happen to me, that the magnitude of the loss would overshadow everything else in my life that had ever made me suffer. But I had begun to see that for most of the blind people I knew, there were sadnesses and tragedies far more painful than the failure of their eyes. For most of them, their blindness was not psychologically, or even practically, their greatest hardship. It did not appear to be present in their minds as the central fact about themselves. They were all frustrated and disappointed at having been marginalized, scorned, and treated with disrespect because of their blindness, and they were here because they had chosen to devote their lives to changing that and similar discriminations, to battling ignorance and the hatreds that arise from it. But they were human beings just like the rest of us, with lives and important relationships and personal complications that from time to time took precedence over everything else. Just like the rest of us.

  As I was getting up from the table to get some more rice, I saw Jayne approaching the stage at the end of the dining room. She leaned over a bit and considered the step up carefully before she took it, and then she turned to face the room. “Everyone!” she shouted. “Listen to me! I have an
announcement to make. One of our colleagues is celebrating a birthday. Can you all help to sing the happy-birthday song?”

  The room went silent. As she spoke, Jayne held her hands clasped before her at arm’s length, fingers intertwined, in a posture of pleading. She announced that she would not reveal who the birthday person was but that when we reached the point in the song at which the name was usually mentioned, we should just fill the space in by singing “Hmmm-hmmm-hmmm.” “And,” Jayne said, “when we reach ‘how-old-are-you-now,’ we will let the birthday person stand up and tell us how old she is!”

  Jayne began to sing the song, and the rest of us, somewhat puzzled, joined in. After a few phrases, Jayne planted her hands on her hips and shouted in impatience and displeasure, “Wait a minute! Stop! Will you all please try to sing it musically?”

  Jayne’s confident bossiness was so charming and her intent so heartfelt that it was impossible for anyone to protest. We started the song over, and when we reached the point at which the celebrant is addressed by name, we did as we were instructed and somewhat ridiculously hummed the notes of the song. As we sang, someone flipped off the dining room lights, and the kitchen staff came out carrying a large birthday cake lit with a single candle and placed it on the serving table. At the song’s end, we waited for the birthday person to stand up. Finally Pynhoi got slowly out of her chair and went to the table with her hands pressed over her mouth. She leaned over, her face aglow in the candlelight, and examined the cake, scanning it carefully through her glasses, and when she realized that it had the words Happy Birthday, Pynhoi written on it in pink icing, she gasped in disbelief and delight and hugged herself. Someone handed her a large knife and instructed her to cut the cake. Instead, Pynhoi began to pace back and forth in front of the table, waving the knife as she talked.