More about the visually impaired students

Visiting the VI unit - Visually Impaired - is always a surprise because personality clears away the preconceptions about blind people.

This morning three of the girls, two who are partially sighted and who can identify some things very close to them with the help of touch, and who wear spectacles, and one blind, arrived in the office to have their permission slip checked before going to eye clinic.

To be patronising, a group of girls, regardless of their ability to see, should be collectively called a giggle of girls.

They collected their hospital cards, and went to the eye clinic to have their spectacles mended because the usual collection of screws had fallen out.

We suffer from this as well in the UK, even with frames that cost as much as a small car.

If you visit their classroom and offices, the place grows on you. Tanzanian classrooms in general are not the welcoming places that you see in the UK where education is very child centred. Some mzungu* complain about that along the lines of ‘what about adult centred?’ and also ‘it weren’t like this when I were young, were it?’

In a way this is like it was when ‘I were young’.

There are thirty or more wooden desks, made from local timber, and a similar number of chairs. This school is lucky because it has desks and chairs. There are schools in Tanzania where there are no desks or chairs, so students sit on the floor.

The classrooms here are mostly empty of any reflection of student work - no noticeboards, no displays, no reminders. The chalkboard is above a concrete dais, and the teacher’s desk stands on the dais. The student desks are arranged so that they face the front, but are fairly haphazard.

There is always sand on the floor, drawn in by shoes. It is rare to find carpeting anywhere as sand arrives without invitation, blown by the wind, dragged in by feet. The classrooms are swept each morning.

But the classrooms are quite bleak and monotone, and there is surely a missed opportunity for some passive education, recognition and praise that comes from posting student work. We are working on it.

Checking her work by reading it with her fingers.
The braille machines were funded by
the Chinese government:
they are made in the USA and cost
around £800 each. 

But in the VI unit, this kind of recognition is sometimes wasted: because a very few of the students who are visually impaired can see enough to make sense. Sight ranges from recovered - such as students who may have suffered from cataracts or from trachoma (a disease that makes the surface of the eyelid rather abrasive and this damages the eye surface, and is cured with antibiotics because it is a close relative of chlamydia) - through sight in one eye, poor sight in one eye, no sight and at the end of the scale, no eyes.

Just thinking about this is harsh.

The VI students have been prevented from taking lessons in science and maths - because they are blind. But when you watch a blind person cooking, you realise that they can handle a laboratory sensitively. Last week the government announced that VI students are to take science and maths as of this Monday, as of Form 1 (which is UK Year 8).

When you enter their working classroom, when for example they are using braille machines,the atmosphere is the same as any good classroom. Busy, and productive. When you enter during the breaks, the social business is on, and speaking to them in English - slowly, without convoluted syntax or words like convoluted or syntax - draws out the personalities, which are strong and engaging.

This stool was made by Visually
Impaired students.

Akili plays keyboard. He’s quite good at it and would like to go on getting better at it. But he was a bit naughty, let someone else borrow the keyboard, and in the process lost the mains adapter, which meant the end of keyboard. Until we bought another adaptor and read the riot act, as the expression goes.

Reading the riot act in English actually doesn’t achieve much. Tanzanians have a great deal of faith in God, and they thank God every day for allowing them another day, and remind God that their aspirations need to be fulfilled and they are expecting this to happen without fail.

So looking after a mains adaptor is actually God’s business.

Such is life. If you understand the sign in some pubs in the UK that says “Free beer tomorrow” you’ll understand the Tanzanian “tomorrow”. Frequently, and frequently enough for it to be statistically significant, things are promised for “tomorrow”. Ten phone calls, fifteen emails and some weeks later it will be done “tomorrow”.

And that’s perfectly logical. You wake up in the morning knowing that yesterday you promised to do something tomorrow. So you make sure that you have it scheduled for tomorrow, and each morning you repeat your commitment to doing it tomorrow.

Does that make sense?

It is a lesson that people in the UK should heed, and stop pretending. I could name some names. Tomorrow.

*mzungu - white people.