The birth of a vision

For years, my mother spent her afternoons reading textbooks to blind girls at the Women’s College hostel in Thiruvananthapuram. Books in Braille were impossible to come by and none of the girls had access to computers, leave alone expensive software that converts text to speech. Mother returned from many of her reading sessions with not just a sore throat but saddened by the numerous challenges her young students faced, especially since most came from disadvantaged families that had struggled to get them this far. She ended up sponsoring living expenses for a couple of them, one of whom — thrillingly — managed to get a job with IBM in Chennai while another went on to teach at a college in Kudangalloor.

Not that either story ends neatly there, as new issues inevitably crop up along the way such as getting safely to and from places of work and, in the case of the college lecturer, finding local readers who would enable her to prepare for lectures.

With blindness therefore lodged deep in my psyche as a deeply debilitating condition, I could barely contain my astonishment when I met Sabriye Tenberken, a blind German woman, who had come to Thiruvananthapuram after cheerily overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles in Tibet in order to get a better deal for its blind children. Over further conversation, I found that Sabriye had for some years been running an institute on the banks of Vellayani lake to which people from across the world came to receive an unusual kind of training. I had to see this for myself and friends who live across the lake from Sabriye’s institute offered to facilitate a visit. It was thus that we set off recently for the peaceful environs of the large, lotus-filled freshwater lake I had once seen on a trip back from Kovalam.

On arriving at our friends’ house, we were told that Sabriye was coming with two boats to pick us up as “she worries about all of us getting lost without her being there to guide us”. And guide us she did, blowing through the door like a small whirlwind that instantly whipped up the atmosphere with bright chatter and laughter. Completely at ease with her disability, Sabriye swiftly made it possible for us to acknowledge and engage with her blindness in a manner that was so positive I found myself continually surprised by the many shifts my previously-held opinions were being forced to make.

In a pair of pedal-boats (I soon found that Sabriye and her partner Paul are also keen and uncompromising environmentalists), we cut a leisurely swathe through sparkling water and lotus pads to Kanthari, an eco-friendly institute that for the past five years has been training and empowering young people, often themselves disabled, to become agents of social change in distant parts of the world.

Sabriye explained the name: the Kanthari chilli plant is ubiquitous in Kerala, she said, found in every backyard. The sharp spiciness and medicinal value of the chillies are not dissimilar to the attitudes that this institute attempts to instil in its graduates, as they are guided into disseminating a powerful and empowering message.

I had lunch with a few trainee Kantharis who, midway through their course, were preparing to leave for their internships.

A young man from Nigeria called Bash told me about his past work in a prison back in Lagos where he wanted to return, enabled by his training, to launch an innovative educational initiative that would not merely educate but also reform prisoners before they returned to society.

Another man, partially sighted, was hoping to go back to his native Zambia in order to help disabled people make a decent living out of livestock farming and management.

A young Nepalese woman told me about Blind Rocks, a remarkable venture that would show blind people how to have fun despite their disability.

Even though the kappa and meen curry served in the Kanthari canteen was delicious, I barely noticed the food on my plate for the surging elation each of these ideas set off in me.

Wandering around the campus later with Sabriye, at one point squeezing my eyes tightly shut and trying with encouragement from her to use her white cane, I noticed laptops in the common room verandah, a film editing suite, a broadcasting console… all signs of the worldwide community Kanthari graduates are encouraged to tap into for cultivating synergies and keeping in touch with mentors and donors. Sabriye described Kanthari’s success rate, when graduates went on to successfully start their own projects, as being about 50-60 per cent, laughing that a friend who worked at the World Bank had told her it was better than theirs of 10 per cent. But it remains an ongoing point of concern to the Kanthari staff that, despite all their efforts, recruitment procedures continue to bring candidates from all over the world except India. Even Nepal and Bangladesh were responsible for a healthy proportion of the applications they received every year, but Indians remained strangely elusive.

Bash, the young man with the dream of reforming the Nigerian prison system, told me that he was getting ready to travel to Vellore to present a Tedx talk. The subject was “Dream Again”. When I asked him what that meant, he explained that, while many young people felt fired up by their dreams, it was important for them to also realise the difficulties of seeing a dream through, the patience and persistence that was required to keep from giving up too easily. Bash’s face was shining as he spoke and I felt a pang of regret that, when his course ended, he would pack his bags, and his dreams, and say goodbye to India.

(For more information on the Kanthari programme, see www.kanthari.org)