Response to a Heartache

For the most part the sighted children are willing and able to help the challenged ones and they seem to be well assimilated. Subodh, one of our sponsored kids, placed 1st in a class of 185 8th graders and last year he placed 4th. He understands that education is his ticket to opportunity despite his blindness. He knows his strengths and has harnessed it to excel. He won 3 awards this year: one in speech, the second in poetry and a third in quiz competition. He has won cash prizes and medals and trophies to prove his achievements. The sad part is that these awards seem to have disappeared from the Resource Room the teachers have told him they were going to store them. Are they worth any money? Could they have sold them? That’s only one of the questions we began to ask this evening as Subodh began to tell us about the injustices that have befallen these visually challenged students.

We had invited Subodh to dine with us that evening and here is shared the pain and heartache he has stored in to his giving heart. He belongs to a school that has been part of an inclusive program supported by the government. Hostel accommodations are provided to the school plus 3 resource teachers who would teach the students braille and support them in their integrated study with sighted children. We have come to find out that the resource teachers are not teaching braille but teaching sighted students other subjects. They hardly receive their braille paper and rely on their sighted friends to read to them. The older students have taken it upon themselves to teach the younger students braille and together they try to make their tests and homework with whatever is provided to them. If this was not horrible enough, he had also revealed that some musical instruments donated by some foreign visitors to their hostel has been taken away and provided for use by sighted students.

Something definitely must be done about this!

We are back in Kathmandu at the NAWB (Nepal Association for the Welfare of the Blind), a non-profit organization that has the support of INGOs from Germany and Japan, trifc.org, government ministries of Nepal and a host of local foundations to provide resources, education, vocational training for the visually impaired children and adults. NAWB operates in 7 districts which serves 5500 children. They had estimated that there are 30,000 visually challenged school aged children in the country.

We were there to check on the 200 boxes of Braille books we had shipped from Seattle to build the first National Braille Library of Nepal and plan the project to catalogue the Books and ensure that these are disseminated via a Mobile Library to the districts that NAWB covers. There are plans for India to donate the vehicle for this purpose.


We had brought our concerns to Rajan Raut, Immediate past chairman of the center. He's a Rotarian and passionate supported of this organization, he will follow up on the goings on at the Sanjuwani School Blind Hostel and Resource center with the help of the Rotary Club at Dhulikhel. It is a start in the correction of practices that have harmed the blind students’ progress. It is encouraging to note that despite the seemingly unjust society, that when good people are asked to do something about an injustice, there are Rotarians who will stand up and take the challenge, work in their environment and ensure positive change for the students and the future of the inclusive program.

On our part, Sita Gyawali, our volunteer will continue to keep in touch with Subodh and the other students on their progress and needs and relay conditions to Mr. Rajan Raut for continued action and support.