From the Washington Post:

‘Blindsight,‘ directed by Lucy Walker, documents the efforts of an educator and a mountaineer, both blind, to lead six blind Tibetan teenagers up Lhakpa Ri, the 23,000-foot neighbor of Mount Everest. Walker teamed with American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, the first and only sightless climber to scale Mount Everest.

The young people have been ostracized in their native Tibet, where blindness is seen as a punishment for sins of past lives. Tenberken is the founder of the educational program Braille Without Borders.

Combating ’shame’ of blindness by David Hiltbrand in the Philadephia Inquirer:

Sabriye Tenberken has experienced firsthand the prejudice that blind people are subjected to in her adopted homeland of Tibet. She has heard the curses directed at students from her training center, Braille Without Borders, when they venture out on the streets of Lhasa.

This shocking treatment stems in part from ignorance and in part from religious beliefs in this Buddhist country.

There is a remarkable scene in the new documentary Blindsight, capturing the attempt of six of Tenberken’s blind students to scale a 23,000-foot peak in the Himalayas, that shows a Tibetan boy musing about the crimes he must have committed in a previous life to have earned the terrible karma of blindness.

But according to Tenberken, who went blind at 12, she encounters discrimination in Europe and the United States that is just as distressing, even if it is more subtle.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 6:57 am and is filed under arts/music, blindness/visual impairments, discrimination, documentary, movies, public attitudes, stereotypes, stigma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post