Sabriye Tenberken // trailblazers
When you’re talking about a trailblazer, you’re talking about someone like Sabriye Tenberken. Trailblazers are persistent. They know exactly what they want and they don’t take no for an answer. If there’s no known path to get where they want to go, a trailblazer forges their own. Sabriye Tenberken was born in Germany in 1970. As a young girl, her eyesight began to slowly deteriorate. She was diagnosed with a retinal disease that threatened to take her sight completely. A diagnosis like this could easily devastate a family, but Tenberken’s parents did not allow it to upend their lives. Instead, they decided to use the next several years traveling, allowing their daughter a chance to see the world and build up her visual memories with whatever time she had left to do so. By the time she became totally blind at age twelve, Tenberken’s parents had clearly instilled in her the idea that she had no limits. She was already more worldly and more cultured than most people become in their entire lifetimes. As she got older, her interest in the world’s cultures never wavered. At Bonn College, she majored in Central Asian Studies. She learned Mongolian and Chinese alongside both classical and modern Tibetan, as well as studying philosophy and sociology. This is where she began to run into uncharted territory. The subjects Tenberken was interested in were ones that had never been studied by a blind student before. Rather than giving up and choosing a different field of study, she decided to build it herself. There was no Braille version of the Tibetan language? No problem, Tenberken would just invent one herself! She modified international Braille to correspond to specific Tibetan characters and sounds. By 1992, she had completed a fully functional Tibetan Braille alphabet approved by native speakers and Tibetan scholars alike. As the creator of Tibetan Braille, Tenberken travelled to Tibet in 1997 with the goal of evaluating the needs of Tibet’s blind community. The situation as she found it was in dire straits. Because there had been no Tibetan Braille alphabet until this point, most blind children there simply were not sent to school. The social stigma against blindness led many Tibetan families to effectively hide their blind children away from the world. In 1998, Sabriye Tenberken founded the first school for the blind in Tibet. The school started small with only five students enrolled and Tenberken – the only faculty member – acting as teacher, coordinator, and advisor to each of the children. Running the school was no easy task. Underestimated at every turn, Tenberken found little support from outside sources. Many European organizations refused to send aid, believing too literally in the old adage of “the blind leading the blind.” How, they asked, could a woman who herself was blind possibly succeed at the task she had set before herself? Tenberken, of course, was undaunted. She continued her work with the school, eventually training native Tibetans as teachers and turning over the school’s day-to-day operations to one of her former students. Once she was sure that the school was in good hands, Tenberken moved on to her next big project. She and her partner, Paul Kronenberg, founded Braille Without Borders, an organization designed to teach Braille to blind students in developing countries throughout the world. As Tenberken did in Tibet, in any country reached by BWB that does not already have their own Braille system, the organization works to develop one. They also provide vocational training to help blind members of these communities get jobs with the ultimate goal of helping them support themselves. It’s easy to give up on a project when you’re told that there’s no known way to accomplish it. When most of us come to a block in the road, we simply turn around and go back the way we came. But for a someone like Sabriye Tenberken, that block is a challenge. It’s just another new trail to blaze.
