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| The blind kid Dawa listening to a mobile phone. Photo by: China Daily Website |
The Tibetan Children's Braille School which was developed from a rehabilitation & training center into a preparatory school for blind children sits in a traditional Tibetan yard on Jiangsu Road in Lhasa founded by a blind German woman named Sabriye Tenberken and her Dutch husband Paul Kronenberg in 1998. Dawa Tsering who is from Tibet, a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas, in the People's Republic of China, is a 14-year-old kid among one of the students who study in Tibetan Children's Braille School. Dawa is a brilliant boy who can speak Chinese, Tibetan and English fluently. As any normal child he acts as a leader both in studies and in games with his friends. He helps his teachers and classmates do washing and cleaning. Dawa can even walk in and out of the classroom without any assistance but unfortunately Dawa suffers from congenital blindness. Many people with serious visual impairments can only travel independently, using a wide range of tools and techniques while Dawa remains different.
A child like Dawa who is born blind does not know what it is like to see. Until he is old enough to begin to understand how other people do things, blindness seems normal. Dawa who always had a dream wants to be an English teacher. The teen wishes that he can be admitted to a regular school in his hometown in Xigaze after graduation from the Braille school next year. Blindness is defined by the World Health Organization as vision in a person's best eye of less than 20/500 or a visual field of less than 10 degrees but Dawa never believes blindness as a curse or an obstacle. The word "blind" is often used to signify a lack of knowledge of something but Dawa deeply believes that blindness is not to the eye but to the mind. In Dawa's view he always acknowledges that as long as a man opens his mind to imagine and to dream, his world will be filled with light.
The topic of blindness and education has included evolving approaches and public perceptions of how best to address the special needs of blind students. Blind children in Tibet like Dawa did not have much access to education years ago. Most of them led a life on the margin of society with few chances of integration. That's why Sabriye & Paul decided to stay in Lhasa to help those children. Their value lies not only in teaching blind children knowledge and manual skills, but also in providing them with the belief that they can too live a happy life like the other normal children, having their own ideal and fulfilling their dream through efforts. Currently there are six teachers and over 40 children in the Tibetan Children's Braille School. In terms of the worldwide prevalence of blindness, it is present on a much greater scale in developing world countries than in developed world countries. Most people reduce blindness to the level of a nuisance by using their own imaginations to figure out what techniques are best suited to specific experiences. Just because we never saw someone who is blind doing a thing it always doesn't mean it can't be done. Dawa, the blind boy whose world has never been dark is proving us that reality.
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