Reaching out and touching
visually-impaired people

Jon Jeffery, the UBS Planning and Research Officer, reflects on a workshop for which he and Ingrid Felber-Bischof, UBS VIP and Braille Coordinator, acted as joint facilitators in Thailand recently

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — Guests at the hotel in Chiang Mai might well have expected to see some Very Important Persons: ‘The Amari Rincome Hotel Welcomes the UBS VIP Research Workshop’, proclaimed the banner on the forecourt.

It depends, of course, on what you understand by ‘VIP’. In this case, it meant ‘Visually-Impaired People’ and, as the days went by, many of us grew in our understanding of how important and precious this group of people are.

International

The workshop, held from March 19 to 23, brought together an international array of people who work with VIPs. They included senior Bible Society staff and board members, and representatives of five other Christian agencies including Compass Braille and Lutheran Braille Workers. The 16 people who attended came from nine different countries.

The aim of us all was to improve the ways in which we serve this important group, by working together and co-ordinating and sharing our programs.

Research

To this end we concentrated on exploring what we do and how we do it, and on the need for carrying out and taking part in research amongst our audience.

With the latter aspect in mind, as we explored, shared and described our understanding of VIPs and our ambition of serving them better, we jointly formulated a research project, which we carried out ‘in the field’ in the last two days.

Invited

In preparing for the workshop, we had made contact with Chiang Mai’s Royal Northern School for the Blind, as well as with the Workshop for the Blind, on the edge of the city. In response both invited us to pay them a visit and talk with the children, adults and staff at these two facilities.

some told us they feared loneliness – they wondered how they would cope when their mother, their main helper, died, for example.

Many of us were to find carrying out a practical piece of research amongst visually-impaired young people and adults in the field not only informative, but also surprisingly moving and inspiring.

Everyone we met at the Royal Northern School and the Workshop for the Blind – pupils, staff and others – were delighted that we were interested in hearing their views and serving their needs. The young people were doubly thrilled because all the participants had brought small gifts from their own countries as a way of saying thank you to them for helping with the research. Little Words of Wisdom books in Braille, sweets from India, tapes of stories about Jesus, baseball caps from the United States and T-shirts from Indonesia and Lebanon were among their favourites.

Appeal

As we got down to business we asked the children what kind of books, stories and tapes they liked and we questioned them sensitively about their fears and concerns. The aim of it all was to help us design publications which would appeal to a visually-impaired audience and engage them in the Scriptures.

One problem was that the subjects of our research spoke Thai but little or no English, whereas the language of the workshop was English and none of us spoke more than a few phrases of Thai. Fortunately, however, we had recruited help from a group of English-speaking students at the Chiang Mai University and they acted as our interpreters and translators.

Negotiators

They, too, were a joy to work with. Although only one was Christian, in return for basic travel expenses and a small honorarium they helped us in a thousand different ways. Entirely without being asked, two came in each day to run errands, get papers printed and generally make themselves useful. They also took workshop participants on visits to a local Buddhist monastery and acted as ‘negotiators’ for us on shopping and other sightseeing excursions.

At the end of the workshop the Christian girl described how working with us had strengthened her commitment and made her very proud to be a believer. The others all said that they thought we were “very nice, kind people – perhaps because of being Christian.” For our part, many of us acquired a warmer appreciation of a number of aspects of Buddhism.

Religion, faith and ‘the gods’

From our research among the VIPs we discovered that they all enjoyed listening to stories on cassette tape – especially, somewhat surprisingly, those about religion, faith, wise and brave men and ‘the gods’. When sharing their concerns in life generally, some told us they feared loneliness – they wondered how they would cope when their mother, their main helper, died, for example. The feeling that they are ‘put down’ or scorned by many sighted people was also mentioned.

When conducting research of this kind it is important to meet people ‘where they are’ and ‘at their level’ and this was something that workshop participants took literally. When we visited the Royal Northern School, for example, the Rev Dr Fred Odutola, the newly-appointed General Secretary of the Bible Society of Nigeria, sat happily on the floor of the library discussing Braille materials with some of the younger children.

Given that we had gone among them to listen and to learn, we deliberately avoided overt evangelism – although some of us found it difficult.

Useful

One of the advantages of holding the workshop in a country whose culture is predominantly Buddhist was that it forced us to explore ways of carrying out research for Christian mission in a culture where Christianity is a minority faith. This was especially useful for the participants who came from Bible Societies such as that of Egypt, where Islam is the dominant faith.

All the participants agreed that the workshop and the practical experience offered by the fieldwork had led to new insights into the needs and aspirations of visually-impaired people, and had shown us how to work together effectively, respecting each other’s differences in approach and mission, while co-operating in practical areas to serve. It gave us all lessons about working in a cultural setting which was unfamiliar.

Better understanding

Henry Kalule, the General Secretary of the Bible Society of Uganda, summed it up like this: “We have often tried to work with blind people, but we have not always understood the problems and the needs… I am now going back with a much better understanding and also with new determination to work with specialist Christian VIP agencies in my country.”

Perhaps what spoke loudest about the experience in Chiang Mai was that as one walked around and saw colleagues interacting with the blind youngsters at the Royal Northern School and the Workshop for the Blind, one saw more than one Bible Society General Secretary having to wipe away tears as he learned of their circumstances, and heard of the pain, courage and wisdom required from these young blind people.