A story about a blind girl

Last Friday I had a coffee with a girl, named G. She is very special. She gives out this kind of energy that if energy was plushy, her energy would be a big soft warm bear. She is sweet and very gentle. She is blind, but you could not tell if you look at her.

We met in a Phuc Long tea shop near NEU. The weather was perfect for a meetup. She kept telling me “The weather is so nice. I wish it stays like this all the time”. And then we bought fruit tea and sat down to a small table next to the AC because it was warm inside. I told her that “Hey, if I say something that saddens you, or offends you, please tell me and forgive me because I’ve never talked to a blind person before”. “That’s ok, we know you don’t mean that”. She kept calling us - people who can see normally - “mắt sáng”, which means seeing eyes.

Education is not for everyone

G has been blind ever since she was born. No one knows why she was born that way. No one in her family got that. Her sister was born with normal vision.

We also talked a lot about Chinese love novels, like how both of us indulged ourselves in reading these and actually felt happy reading that. We then talked about how the disabled children learned in secondary school Nguyen Dinh Chieu, that this school is now a privilege to only children living in Hanoi, and how hard it was to get submitted into a high school in Hanoi.

Not all high schools in Hanoi supports disabled students because it requires special training and equipment to educate them, not to mention blind ones. She wanted to enter Thang Long High School, but the Department of Education and Training told her that she had to receive the agreement from the principal. At that time, the principal of Thang Long High School was thay Dung, who agreed to have a talk with her. He asked about her grades during the secondary school and her hobbies. It turned out that they both had a common interest in pottery and they had a long chat about that. After that talk, he approved her entrance into the school.

After 3 years, she then passed the entrance exam to University of Social Sciences and Humanities and now is studying her master degree there. She is also applying for an Australian scholarship to study wellbeing and happiness. She told me that she wanted to see the world in another country, how it is like to live in a country that is very supportive to disabled people.

A stupid prejudice

I told her that her energy was very warm and positive, because I had had a prejudice that blind people are always sad (!). I chucked this thought until I met her. She said “No we are not sad at all. In the opposite, we are very happy and cheerful. People think that it is sad in our world because we cannot see. The truth is we were born this way, and we don’t feel sorry for ourselves at all. We enjoy life in our own way, and people don’t understand that. If one person was born blind, he is still happy to be able to talk, to feel, compared to a person who was born with sighted eyes and then got blind, this person would feel much miserable and desperate. Same result but different journey. It is about the mindset”.

That is so true. One sees that he gains more, the other sees that he just loses something. It’s such pure wisdom.

We then talked about how she managed to read books with technology and the struggles she had with downloading new books and reading science materials ever since b-ok got taken down (I was very sad as well, but there’s an alternative).

She learned letters with braille (chữ nổi) and she told me that it took 10 books of braille just to learn Literature when she was in primary school, and each book costs 300k! So to learn just one subject, it costs like 3 million VND! Also a brille typewriter costs more 300 million VND! People with visual impairment are usually not in good wealth, but education for them is even more expensive than normal people. Even the teachers in her university encounter difficulties in finding books for her because her screen reader can only read Word files.

She said “People are used to thinking that we can only do jobs like massage, making toothpicks, but actually we are more capable than that”. I could feel a slight pain and bitterness in her voice, that this society is not designed to be friendly with visually impaired people and they have to struggle to get the knowledge and learn the knowledge. Why does knowledge have to be so expensive and out of reach for a vulnerable group?

Asking for help

We bid each other goodbye but I know this will not be the last time we met. I want to know more about herself and her community, find a way that I can help them.

I am also looking for a blogging platform that is accessible to people with visual impairment by using shortcuts on keyboard. These human beings have their own voices and they want to share it with the world. So please share if you know 🙏. Thank you!