The daily Star is a newspaper in Beirut Lebanon.  Sometimes we don't
realize how much social attitudes have developed in the west and how well
we actually have it.

kelly 

>From the web page:

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/features/F180599a.htm

Tape recorder trick that led to help for the blind 

Sana Saade was not prepared for the miserable conditions that some blind
children in Sidon had to endure. 
Five years ago, the 33-year-old who has been blind most of her life
following a car accident, decided she wanted to give poor blind children
the opportunity to get an education and eventually be integrated into
regular schools ­ something she had to fight for herself. 
She approached administrators at the Ghassan Kanafani Center at the Ain
al-Hilweh refugee camp in Sidon, and they decided to adopt her idea through
the special education facilities they have at their school. Workshops were
conducted to show teachers how to teach the non-sighted and the school
geared itself to welcoming the new students. 
But the students never came. Puzzled, Saade went around the neighborhood
near the center trying to find non-sighted youngsters. What she discovered
was that many blind children were neglected and often abused by parents who
could not accept their disabilities. 
And it didn’t stop with the children. 
She also found blind teenagers and young adults who rarely ventured out of
their homes. 
“There were some 30-year-olds who had never tasted a tomato or a banana,”
she said. “They had never even heard of them. They hadn’t the faintest idea
what a spoon was. Others had never used a toilet.” 
Some teenagers had been cooped up for so long they could barely walk. “One
young girl whose family had rarely spoken to her was petrified of
everything,” she said. 
Deciding that she had to play the roles of both educator and therapist,
Saade looked for ways to convince parents to allow their children to attend
school. That, she said, was the hardest part of all. 
“They were ashamed of them,” she said. “They didn’t want anyone to know
that they had produced these children. They kept asking me what the point
was of educating them.” 
There was only one way to convince the parents and that was by working out
what their real objections were. She planted tape recorders inside their
homes. 
“I would leave my purse there with 
the recorder in it,” she said. “Two hours later I would come back to
retrieve it saying that I forgot it.” 
On tape would be the conversations in which parents discussed the
implications of sending their disabled children to school. 
“That way I knew how to prepare myself when I went back next time and they
had all these excuses,” she said, laughing. “The mother, for example, would
be blaming her husband for not allowing the child to go to school, but it
would turn out that she was the one who didn’t want it.” 
The Kanafani Center took up the cause and the administration invited
parents to lectures and tours of the school. 
Slowly, the children began arriving: Each morning, the Kanafani Center sent
its bus around to pick them up and each day Saade found herself dealing
with children unprepared to face the outside world. 
“It’s hard,” she admitted. “We work with these children and young adults a
lot so they can gain confidence in themselves and be convinced that they
too can contribute positively to society.” 
The children attending the center are thriving, and now take lessons
alongside sighted children. “They all take the same lessons,” said Saade.
“There are some 
classes especially for blind pupils, but the sighted ones have to attend
them as well.” 
Not satisfied with existing books for teaching the blind, Saade wrote her
own. “These children are different,” she said. “The lessons therefore have
to be taught differently.” 
Five years after the project was launched, three children have finished the
three-year program at the center and are now attending other schools, with
sighted children, Saade said proudly. 
Some 17 students, aged from 3 to 30, still take lessons at the center. 
Their success takes on a special meaning for Saade. Since losing her sight
at the age of eight, she has been struggling for acceptance. Determined to
continue her education, she attended schools for the blind but later moved
to a regular school in Sidon to get her baccalaureate degree. 
But when she went to the Serail to register for the baccalaureate exam, she
got her first shock: The official there turned her away because she wanted
to bring her Braille typewriter in with her. He told her that just because
she was blind did not mean exceptions would be made for her. “He told me I
didn’t need an education,” she said. 
Eventually, she did manage to take her typewriter into the exams. “But
monitors demanded I write down my name on the paper anyway,” she said. 
It was then that she decided to fight for the education of the blind and
integrate them with the sighted. 
Her fight, however, is far from over. She knows of a brother and a sister
who are blind and who have been locked up in their homes by their family.
Although she has not yet been able to reach them she does not intend to
stop trying. 

Reem Hadad 

DS: 18/05/99 

Copyright© 1999 The Daily Star. All rights reserved.


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