By Erik Rasmussen
In an isolated Mexican city, nestled against a jungle containing ancient Central American Indian ruins, approximately 100 blind students acquire literacy skills. This stems from the efforts of a few blind Utah residents, their friends and LDS Charities.
Norman Gardner, UVSC professor and executive director of the Orem-based Braille Resource and Literacy Center, recently headed a group that delivered the necessary equipment to create high-quality Spanish Braille textbooks to the Centro Integral para Ciegos: Pachela Rovirosa de Gaudiano (school), in Villahermosa, Mexico. Much of the donation to buy the equipment was made possible through a grant from LDS Charities.
Gardner, a member of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), has been legally blind his entire life. As a child, he resisted associating with other blind people because of the social stigma placed on them, he said. He carried those feelings with him as he went through graduate school at Brigham Young University and while he earned his doctorate at the University of Utah.
Gardner said his association with the NFB shortly after college changed his view of how blind people can be an integral part of society and gave him the motivation to look past social stereotypes and help fulfill a portion of the school”s needs.
“I learned that it”s respectable to be blind,” Gardner said. “I finally felt peace deep down inside. When I learned that I had been the beneficiary of devoted blind people my entire life, I realized that I had a debt. It was just the thing to do to try to help this school in Mexico.”
In June, Gardner, his wife Maggie and son David, Ray and LuWana Martin of the Utah Division of Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and Dr. Janice Gygi, chair of marketing and international business at UVSC, made the trip to Villahermosa with enough supplies to save months, even years of tireless labor that would otherwise have been spent in the creation of Braille textbooks.
Braille, created in the 1800”s by a blind French teacher named Louis Braille, is just bumps on paper to those who are unfamiliar with it. But, to those who use it as a primary means of obtaining information, Braille is the porthole through which they view the world. Through it, they learn everything that print textbooks teach those with sight.
Braille is created using three different methods, Gardner said. The first two ways are by hand: a tiresome and laborious task even for skilled Braille writers. At the Centro, this year-round responsibility is usually delegated to the mothers of the middle-class blind students. The third method of creating Braille is through computer equipment. During their June trip, Gardner and his colleagues delivered two Interpoint embossers, which allow Braille to be punched on both sides of a sheet of paper, to the school. They also took the computer software and supplies necessary to transfer print versions of textbooks into a format suitable to be translated and created in Braille. In addition, they taught six teachers at the school how to use the equipment.
“This is a great time-saver,” Gygi said. “Being able to produce more books will help these children and their families.” One family drove five hours to Villahermosa to obtain other special equipment the group delivered to help their blind son communicate in Braille.
Martin said that even though the school in Mexico is a great school, its administrators were a little overwhelmed with the capacity the equipment has to change the lives of the students.
“If you can imagine living in the dark ages, imagine someone coming in and putting in a Kinko”s next door – that”s kind of how it is for the students,” Martin said. “There were blind people thinking their world had ended, but now they”re reaching for employment.”
Unemployment among blind people is mostly attributed to a lack of literacy, according to the NFB. Being able to communicate using Braille, then, is the key to helping school-age blind children grow up to play on a level playing field as their sighted counterparts.
“This project was an opportunity to help blind individuals compete in terms of equality when it comes to literacy,” Martin said.
The June trip wasn”t the first for members of the group to Villahermosa. In fact, in Gardner”s three-year relationship with the school, over 40 thousand dollars in equipment and materials have been donated to the school, according to a local newspaper in Villahermosa that interviewed Gardner during his 2001 visit.
As a marketing professor, Gygi made the trip to Mexico mainly to evaluate the economic effects of such an undertaking, but came home with a broader perspective.
“Blind people are capable,” she said. “If they acquire the skill of communicating in Braille they can assume the roles of sighted people.”
The Centro is currently headed by the late founder”s sister, Margarita Rovirosa. She and other administrators have decided to name a classroom after Gardner, proving to students who struggle to learn that though they may be blind, they don”t need to lose their vision.
