The Poona School for the Blind

Today I visited The Poona School and Home for Blinds Trust. It is located just five minutes from the room I am staying in, and it welcomes volunteers and visitors. Last year I visited a government blind school in Kolkata and was feeling totally disappointed. I had been looking for options for Deepa, and instead just felt thoroughly disheartened that even if I did manage to achieve the miracle I was fighting for, and facilitate an education for her, the school was incredibly anarchic and offered no special help for children with learning difficulties. In fact, the school even refused entry to any blind child showing evidence of a second disability. With this in mind, here in Pune, I went to speak directly to the administration officer and fired my round of automated questions on their selection process and funding.

The Poona School and Home for Blinds Trust was established in 1934 by Dr. Shankar Rao Machva and currently houses and educates 170 boys and 150 girls. The children of primary school age (six to eleven) are educated by specially employed teachers, many of whom are themselves blind. The children and young people who are older attend the normal government schools located outside of the home. This is a brilliant strategy of mainstreaming blind children into the public system. The centre also provides vocational training for young men and women for three to four years after they have finished their formal studies. Sixty percent of the centre's funding comes from the government and the other forty percent comes from donations and supporting national and international ngos. The centre has won various awards and is constantly in the paper for the ventures to facilitate independent lives for their students, while integrating them into society. They are even in the Guinness Book of records for performing a play with the greatest number of blind actors in their annual school play (49 boys, 37 girls and two visually impaired teachers). Their students have been parasailing, perform concerts for the public during all of the major festivals and have held their own fashion show, walking down the cat walk for the cameras.

Walking through the school, the first class room I found was full of music students. The kids were all sitting on the floor and each had a different instrument in their hands. The sound of tablas, accordions, tambourines, cymbals and drums reverberated around the room. Caught in the bind between interrupting and being an uninvited and invisible guest I approached the music teacher and introduced myself. He told the children to stop playing while he described each of their instruments and invited me to look around. He told me he was new to the school and had been working there for three months. He was still adapting, but enjoying the work. The teacher then returned to his students and began singing a rhythm asking the children to follow his lead. When any of the students were having difficulties copying, he would approach them and move their hands to demonstrate how they should play. Watching him teach immediately revealed the gaps between myself and Deepa, he was so sensitive to their needs, and ways to communicate. After I said goodbye, I stood at the door and watched as the class and teacher all remained seemingly unaware of my presence and continued to interact as individuals exploring the musical sounds of a group.

Minutes later the school bell was rung and within seconds the children were running to the door while sliding on their shoes and exploding into the corridors. They ran around the corners and into their dorms or outside, while others sat down with friends. When together, the children would hold hands or had their arms around each other. I found myself trying to quickly dodge out of their way to avoid an inevitable collision as my presence was not in their mental map of their home. As this tactic began to fail, as the children were too quick and too numerous for me, I changed my plan and began to talk. Within seconds a crowd of boys had gathered around me, asking me my name and telling me theirs. Suddenly I was faced with a load of blind boys, many of whom were around Deepa's age, and all of whom were moving as if they had sight and talking fluently and eloquently. Gently touching the boys forearms every time I was answering one of the simultaneously directed questions, I managed to communicate with the group around me. In a change from most other interactions in India, here the barrier between the sexes was left outside. The boys and young men held my hands, playing with my bracelets and feeling my clothes. The boys were incredibly polite and so friendly. Through the help of English skills of one of the older boys who was in his final year of school, they told me about favourite subjects (Maths and Music being the most enthusiastically discussed) while asking me about my life. What was my country? What was my job? Did I play cricket? Then came the hilarious guess-timation of my age. The common agreement seemed to be “nineteen”. When I replied with “thirty” there were smiling sighs of amazement and I tinge of disappointment, although one of the older boys hastened to explain that my “voice was so sweet and soft like a young woman.”

The boys and young men were great, and the school seems a perfect place for them to learn the life skills necessary to go out into the world and pursue their dreams to the best of their abilities. In the words of the school principle, the aim of the school is exactly that: “to provide their students with the skill sets to enable them to live their lives in the sighted world.” I will try and spend as much time as I can with them over the next few days, as I already know they have much to teach and experiences to share. Meanwhile, their counterpart girls school is fifteen kilometers away. I will visit tomorrow.