Women of Faith: blindness offers worlds of color
(Vatican Radio) Imagine a
world where rainbows abound and reds, blues and yellows are vivid splashes of
color brightening up the canvas of your life. That’s the dream world – the very
real one – in which Sabriye Tenberkenhas found herself since she
went blind at age 12.
Born in Germany, Sabriye is
luckier than most; she went to a school where her teachers believed she and her
blind classmates “could do anything.” Besides reading and writing, she
learned how to play ball, ride a horse and even to go white water rafting –
guiding her craft alone down the rapids. She went on to earn a degree in
Tibetology and Central Asian Studies from Bonn University.
Sabriye is one of more
than a dozen women speaking at the International Women’s Day event 8 March in
the Vatican, “Voices of Faith.”
The third annual story-telling event celebrating women from around the globe
and their often unsung achievements is sponsored by the Catholic philanthropic
Fidel Goetz Foundation and hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
in the heart of the Vatican.
In 1997, Sabriye’s sense of
adventure led her to Tibet where she discovered that the blind were often
ostracized “like sinners” because popular belief held that in a past life, they
had committed some horrible crime. “Some people believe that
blind people must have been murderers in their past life.”
No stranger to isolation and
exclusion as a child growing up herself, Sabriye remembers the heartache of humiliation
for an adversity over which she had no control.
Changing the mindset became
her goal. She coded the Tibetan alphabet in Braille and with government support
and together with her friend, Netherlands-born Paul Kroneburg , she opened
Tibet’s very first school for the blind. The two friends founded Braille
without Borders and have seen some 300 students pass through their
doors.
Braille without Borders: A
springboard into new worlds
We are sitting in a cramped,
drab Vatican Radio studio but Sabriye’s earnest green eyes are pools of light,
open wide as if they are taking in a world far wider and immensely fuller than
the one we mortals are in.
“I wanted to create a
springboard to empower the children to understand that they can do a lot
despite the fact that everybody believes that blindness is the end of the
world. That they can understand that they don't have to be ashamed to be
blind, that they can shamelessly jump back into society and say, ‘ hey, I’m
blind – so what ? I can do so many things!’”
Sabriye is surprisingly
grateful for her own blindness, calling it “a precious gift.” Though “it
was years of sorrow… and I was terrified of living in the dark,” she says
when she decided to embrace it, “you learn how to imagine things that are
not obvious.”
“Darkness never came.
And because of my imagination… the world surrounding us become much more
colorful and much more beautiful because we paint our own pictures.”
United in adversity to
fight against discrimination
A successful engineer, Paul
dropped his job in 1998 to follow Sabriye and her dream to Tibet. He too had a
past littered with challenges.
The wrong medication had left
Paul terribly scarred at age eleven. “The problem was gone but my skin
was gone as well. I had no skin on my back for about six years and that
led to exclusion... and kids can be very mean. To Sabriye they
would say ‘you can walk straight’ and she’d fall down the stairs and they’d
have fun. And to me, they’d come and smack me on the back and they would
have fun.”
A taxi driver in a dream
factory where nothing is impossible
Paul and Sabriye call their
school the “dream factory.” “The most beautiful thing about dreaming is
that there are no limits,” Paul says, “anything is possible.”
He tells the story of one of
their blind students, an eight year old boy, who dreamt of being a taxi
driver. Rather than quash the child’s dream, they encouraged him in his
studies. After all, Sabriye quips, “all taxi drivers are blind!”
Two years later, Paul asked
the boy about his dream job. The child admitted that perhaps being a taxi
driver wasn’t the wisest choice for a blind person – but, he said, “I can set
up a taxi company to run the business!”
Empowerment: the trust to explore
your own talents, overcome limits
“And that’s what empowerment
is about: to give people the trust to explore their own talents and their own
limits and hopefully even overcome those,” Paul affirms.
Empowered by their dreams and
armed with education, the first four of the school’s blind students took their
university entrance exams together with sighted kids three years ago.
Many of the kids who have
gone through the program have started their own businesses or their own social
entrepreneurships. One, Paul explains, is running her own kindergarten
for blind and sighted kids and another is now running the Braille without
Borders school.
“These kids had nothing to
lose but their own dignity. They had only to win – no one was expecting
anything from them,” Sabriye explains. “So whatever they did was a plus
already – they were so free and so full of dreams – because we taught them to
dream.”
Since the school opened its
doors back in 1998, the communities where the kids have come from have seen big
changes, Paul observes. Before, he says, “everyone believed that blind
people cannot do anything.”
I’m the only one in my
village to read and write, surf the internet – all because I’m blind!
Paul recounts how one day he
asked a 9 year old boy why he was looking so pleased with himself. The
boy responded that he is the only one in his village who can read and write,
and is the only one for miles around who knows English, Tibetan and
Chinese. “And I’m the only one in an area the size of Holland who knows
that the world is round and who surfs on the internet and sends emails – and
all this because I am blind!” the boy laughed.
Perceptions towards the boy
changed dramatically as people in his village realized he knew a lot more than
they did. It is “a great mindset shift that has happened in many
villages.”
(Tracey McClure)
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