Braille Without Borders In Tibet

How many of you were blind to the fact that Oct. 13th was White Cane Day? OK, me too but my shortsightedness has been restored by a remarkable woman.

Sabrye Tenberken has been blind since her early teens. She attended a special school for the blind in Germany and in eighth grade during a field trip to an exhibit on Tibet, she was romanced by the country's history and culture. So much so that she continued learning about Tibet at the University of Bonn where upon learning there was no Braille script for Tibetan, she went right ahead and developed it herself.

In Tibet there are 2.62 million people of which an estimated 33,000 are blind. The high rate of blindness is largely attributed to a deficiency of vitamin A in the Tibetan diet and exposure to strong ultraviolet rays because of the region’s high altitude. To make matters worse, the blind are treated with great disrespect in Buddhist culture where many people believe the blind are being punishment for something they did in another life. And so there has been little support for or understanding offered to them.

This is what Tenberken witnessed when at the age of 26, she traveled by horseback in Tibet with her own Tibetan Braille under her arm to help the blind in Lhasa. Tenberken told the New York Times, "It was quite depressing, we met blind children who were four or five years old and looked like infants. They hadn't learned to walk because their parents hadn't taught them."

In 1998, Tenberken opened her first school for the blind in Lhasa (Braille Without Borders) along with friend Paul Kronenberg, a Dutch engineer whom she'd met on her travels. The Center opened in mid-1998 with six children. It was not easy-going but fortunately, Tenberken wrote a best-selling book called My Path Leads to Tibet, which has been published in 12 languages and is helping to support the project.

Today, the school has over 30 students between four and 21 years of age. Recently the couple started a vocational training farm for blind people in Shigatse, a small city about 270 kilometers west of Lhasa. The farm trains nomads and farmers who became blind at a later age as well as young adults in agriculture, animal husbandry or cheese production. And their third training centre is enjoying its first year of operation in India.

According to their Web site, the centres are actually changing beliefs about the blind. Increasingly, blindness is being seen as a challenge for the next life rather than as a punishment in this one. How's that for forward thinking?Speaking of which you may want to mark Oct. 13, 2010 on your calendar and take a moment to remember amazing people like Sabrye Tenberken.

Photo courtesy braille&l via Flickr.