Bible library for the blind

By Maya Benediktovich

KYIV, Ukraine — Yuriy Mykolayevich Vishnyakov is the Director of Ukraine’s Central Library for the Blind. He began to lose his sight in 1973 and by 1984 he had gone completely blind. He found learning to read Braille extremely difficult and his troubles were multiplied when his wife left him.

“Those were the darkest days of my life,” he says. Nowadays, however, he is married again and has an eight-year-old son who has already been baptised.

Not allowed

During his own childhood, God was not really allowed into the family home. Neither of his parents were believers and his father, a faithful member of the Communist Party, taught him above all to love his fatherland.

Yet when he began going to church, he said, “I felt something quite different from anything I had experienced before – an unforgettable feeling of peace and comfort which I can’t express in words.”

To my surprise, when I walked into his office to meet him for our interview, he greeted me by my first name.

Astonishment

When I registered astonishment that he seemed to know me, he reminded me of a visit I made to the Association for the Blind while looking for a proofreader to work on the Ukrainian Bible Society’s (UkBS) Ukrainian Braille Bible project more than three years ago.

“I happened to be there during your conversation with our director,” he said, “and I remember your voice.” Again, I was greatly amazed!

With the help of UBS, and also of the UkBS which supplies the stock, the Central Library for the Blind has for many years been the distributor of Ukrainian and Russian Braille Bible Portions to sight-impaired people all over Ukraine. The Library sends Bible Portions to 78 other libraries throughout the country, enabling people to encounter Jesus on pages of Braille. Lovingly Mr Vishnyakov showed me the thick volumes on the library shelves.

“Many blind people from Kyiv and other cities come to our library to read God’s wonderful Word,” he said.

Hunger

But while he is happy to see such hunger for the Bible, he explained that of the 60,000 or so sight-impaired people in Ukraine, almost half cannot read Braille and he is wondering whether Bibles in a more technologically advanced format – which the Central Library does not yet have – could help them.

Another problem the Central Library has is that it contains no Braille Bible resources for children. I shared his acute disappointment at this. We should be generous to people who have to endure the burden of blindness – to children in particular – and help them to come to know God’s Word. (WR 359/15 - 4/5.01)

Maya Benediktovich is a former Assistant to the Director of the Ukrainian Bible Society.