• The Poll
• Visit to the Center for Blind and Weak-Sighted Children
• Blind Person's Vision of the World



Painting of a Blind Girl

The poll

What does light mean to us? We will just quote a few thoughts we heard while inquiring some people from our school:

• without light, we wouldn't be able to see the world which surrounds us
• light is freedom, the beauty of life
• light makes people feel positive, while darkness brings depressions, precariousness and sorrow
• light represents hope for a better future
• light enables us to learn some things we otherwise wouldn't, because the man is afraid of what he doesn't comprehend, just as he is afraid of being alone in the dark
• sunlight makes us feel safe

How important light is for us, we were able to find out during the war, when we lived in total darkness: with no gas or electricity. Here are some thoughts about this:

• only when you lose something, you start to appreciate its importance, so the seldom periods when we had electricity -- light were the only good thing in these days
• when there was electricity, I could watch my favorite show on TV, I could use the hairdryer to dry my hair which wouldn't smell of burned shoes we used as an energy source anymore.
• in the war, light had two opposite meanings: end of war, the dark tunnel (life); and flash of an explosion (death).
• the light from a candle often killed hope for the "real" light
• light was the factor that limited one's freedom of motion, because it made you feel open to "butchers from the hills", who have you targeted at
• for me, light meant that I'm still alive, that something is still moving, and that life hasn't come to a complete stop
• when light wasn't around me, it existed inside me as hope!

Visit to the Center for Blind and Weak-sighted Children

This inquiry made us think about the importance of light. Have you ever asked yourself how do people who were born in "darkness" and who will never be able to see perceive the world around them? What is that world like? We have.

Our curiosity took us to the Center for blind and weak-sighted children in Nedzarici. We thought we should spend at most one hour there, but we stayed for three. And it still wasn't enough to get acquainted with the way of life of blind children. We went there feeling anxious about our meeting with blind people and the possibility of hurting their feelings with our questions. But nothing like that happened. We learned something from them. We learned how to cope with the reality. It is certainly true that loss of sight changes one's whole life. Still, the phenomena of blindness and weak sight as existing defects do not make one completely disabled. The modern system of rehabilitation is based on the principle of compensation of sight by developing other abilities and skills for various jobs. A person's attributes significantly affect his physical, emotional social and professional adaptation. Blind people can very successfully accommodate to a variety of professions: switchboard operator, locksmith, plasterer, physiotherapist etc.

Blind Person's Vision of the World

In the Center for blind people we found out that many amongst them have combined defects: deafness, dumbness, autism and mental retardation. It is very hard to work with such people. Asked about the feelings of blind people who are always in darkness, a pedagogue recited a song for us, written on the theme "Thinking from my angle" by an eighth class pupil (14 years old):

"You said: give me a red rose - red is the symbol of love. I bought you one, and you got angry: the rose was yellow, and yellow is the symbol of jealousy. I cried because my fingers said it was red. And why does Lorka sing about the green hills - when I stand on hill, it is black. And why do all these teachers tell me about the blue Adriatic: when I go to the Adriatic, it is black... and you said one day we will get married...what if you wish a red rose!?"

A girl from the Center won the second prize for her painting in an anonymous painting competition held in New Delhi. Her work was chosen out of 300.000 paintings of other candidates.

This is a question for you to think about: do we see with our eyes? The answer is: no, we see with our brains. The eye is only an organ, and if an artificial connection between the environment and the brain could be made, then eyes wouldn't be a necessary condition for sight anymore. Today, helping aids for blind and weak-sighted people are made successfully. Maybe, they will perceive the light in the future, as well. For medicine it is a great challenge.