Since I had read your book (Touch the Top of the World) with great pleasure, I decided to tell the children about your life. I told them all about your childhood, how you became blind, how you dropped your canes from bridges,  how you finally met other blind people and then how you became confident in wrestling.  All of them were very impressed by all these experiences you had and they compared your experiences with their own ones. They realized that it does not matter much if you are a blind child in Germany,  USA or Tibet,  the experience one has who becomes blind, the embarrassment at first, the confidence which builds up slowly but steadily, the reaction of the sighted surrounding,  is probably for every blind person the same. And at this day when I ended your story by saying: ‘ This man, who is blind like you, climbed to the top of the world, not by holding the arm of a sighted friend, but with the help of some strings and two canes,’  they all proudly decided to walk on their own, without the convenience of walking with the sighted. Stories like yours change their lives.”

Ten years ago, Sabriye applied for a job with a German humanitarian organization serving the third world. Their response was immediate. “We don’t send blind people into third world countries.” So instead, she funded her own way to Tibet. Finding no written Braille system in the Tibetan language, her study of Tibetology enabled her to develop the first ever Tibetan Braille system. She then discovered there was no Tibetan school serving blind children, so she created a training center for the blind and visually impaired. Blind from 13, and recent recipient of the Albert Schweitzer humanitarian award, Sabriye frequently rides horseback through the remote villages of Tibet. Her first trip was shocking, finding blind children four years old who hadn’t been taught to walk. Sabriye’s mission is to change that.  In her letter, she described a typical student. “Gyendsen is a brilliant young student who became blind at the age of 9. Gyendsen comes from a very remote and poor farmer area. After he became blind his family kept him away in a dark room for three years. The family was embarrassed having a blind child. In Tibet, people believe that blindness is a punishment for something that the person has done bad or wrong in his/her previous life. People also believe that blind people are possessed by demons. When he came to our project he was very shy. Now he is one of the best students and is quite confident with handling the computer. He is probably the only one of his village who knows that the world is round, and that one can communicate through just a wire. He is able to tell the other children of his village that ‘iron yaks’ are Toyota Landcruisers, which drink gasoline instead of water.”

Braille without Borders, run by Sabriye and her Dutch partner, Paul Kronenberg, instruct about 30 students. They teach  them to navigate independently with their canes through the chaos of Lhasa, to weave along narrow streets through moving cars and mopeds, around construction sites never protected, and over random holes in the streets, several meters deep, filled with dirty water and excrement. They’re also taught Tibetan Braille and how to use computers with voice synthesizers.  Most importantly, she instills in her students a sense of self-respect and hope. Sabriye funds her center on a shoestring budget, only recently having the funds to buy the school building with an advance from her newly released book, My Path Leads to Tibet.

“After I had told your story to the children,” Sabriye wrote, “the boys were walking together through the inner part of Lhasa… They are sometimes very embarrassed to show their canes, since nomads and pilgrims who never saw a cane before often make fun of them. They call them ‘blind fools,’ imitate them and laugh at them. One of the boys, however, once turned around and said: ‘You cannot talk to me like that.  I am blind but I am not a fool!  And did you ever go to school, do you know how to read and write? Can you find the toilet in the middle of the night without a torch?’

Most of them now understand that there is nothing to be embarrassed about. They can be very proud little people and say quite often, ‘We are blind. So what! We can speak English and Chinese. We can find our way in the labyrinth of Lhasa’s walkways. We are able to read and write in three different Braille scripts, and we read and write without light.’”

The school’s website is www.braillewithoutborders.org .

To read a copy of Sabriye's letter to Erik click here.

Climb high,

Erik Weihenmayer