Silver Lining

Close your eyes and try to walk around in a dark room, difficult isn’t it?? Now imagine living your life like that, well, that’s how it is to be blind… Like everyone else, people who are blind want to live normal active lives and are often more capable than sighted people realize. Despite their difficulties they are cheerful and happy all the time. Devnar is a residential school for the blind. The school has classes from LKG to inter 2nd year. Upto Std 5, students are trained in Braille. Once they are proficient in the usage of Braille, they start their lessons. The school encourages students and helps in their overall development. The children can sing, dance, play instruments, games like cricket and have other talents as well. They work hard…very hard! They learn and write their exams in Braille. But, for their public exams i.e. for when they are in the 10th and inter, they need scribes to write it for them and even during the pre-finals for practice. So, we thought of writing the pre-finals for these children. We spread the news and the response we got was amazing. Students, business people and even house-wives volunteered to write the exam. We even had to turn down a few of them due to excess of volunteers. The exams were for 6 days and the scribes were very excited to write the exams for the students. It was the first time for most of us to write these exams and we were elated. Basically, we just had to read out the questions and write the answers as dictated by the students. The students were strong-willed and tried their best to answer every question in the paper. They were always polite and enthusiastic while giving their answers. You've probably heard that blindness is the most feared disability. You've probably heard that blindness is a tragedy. You've probably heard that blind people are limited in many ways, that the more vision a child has, the better chance of success he or she has, that 80% of what a child learns is visual. Well, forget all that! Blindness does not have to be a tragic situation. It does not inhibit development of concepts, getting an education, being independent, being happy! It was amazing to see the students interact so well with each other, the partially blind kids help the fully blind ones and they were happy to help. One could notice the genuineness in them when they greet you with a big smile, their sincerity when they come to their exam halls on time (the scribes were late on a few occasions), and their innocence when they ask you if you are going to come again the next day to write their exam. The scribes told us how much they enjoyed writing the exam and how, for the first time they weren’t nervous in an exam hall! Many of them stayed back after the exam to interact with the students. We were told that most of the children were neglected and people look down upon them in the society, so even if we give them a little attention their day is made. We observed that since they lack one of their sense organs they make sure that the others work really well. They learn their lessons through cassettes and have their goals set high. Some of them want to become IAS officers while others lawyers, many of their passed out students are working in Multinational companies, one of the students is studying in MIT, Boston. These are truly remarkable achievements. We could feel an urge in them to make their place felt in this competitive world. The volunteers were given certificates by us as we wanted them to know that they were doing a very good job and to encourage them to continue to serve the community and make a difference wherever they go.. Pragnya Challapalli