Braille equipment shipped from Lawrence to aid blind in Baghdad
The Eagle-Tribune, August 16, 2009
By Yadira Betances
LAWRENCE — Images of blind children in Iraq struggling to learn to read and write without Braille printers, papers and books caught David Morgan's attention while watching television one Saturday morning.
"Sometimes you watch something and it doesn't touch you. Here, it was right in front of me," Morgan said. "It was so obvious I had to do something."
Morgan works at the famed Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, where the blind and visually impaired learn to read and write in Braille, a system invented in 1821 by Louis Braille that uses patterns of raised dots to represent letters, numerals and other symbols.
Morgan is the general manager of Perkins Products, a division of Perkins School that manufactures Braille typewriters and other equipment.
Moved by the plight of the teachers and students of Al Noor School for the Blind in Baghdad, Morgan made contact with a military chaplain in Baghdad and arranged to provide Braille equipment to them.
"They were much like our own - teachers and students who need tools to facilitate learning in the classroom. If Perkins couldn't help, who could?" said Morgan.
Also helping the cause were the Sabre Foundation, a non-profit distributor of new books whose warehouse is in Lawrence, and International Relief & Development, an organization that helps send humanitarian aid across the globe.
The Perkins School donated 20 Braille typewriters, a computerized Braille printer with its software, 12 boxes of Braille paper and dozens of back copies of Dialogue, an international news magazine for the blind.
The equipment was stacked on pallets tightly wrapped in plastic at Sabre's warehouse on the sixth floor of an old mill building at 5 Franklin St., then loaded into ocean freight containers and shipped out of the city to Jordan and ultimately transported by land to Baghdad.
"I think it's fantastic," said Tania Vitvitsky, executive director of the Sabre Foundation. "I was thrilled when this opportunity came up because it's a great example of three nonprofits helping the people in Iraq."
Vitvitsky said it cost approximately $25,000 to gather, pack and ship the materials.
Jim Lanning, director of acquisitions and logistics for International Relief & Development, said the agency partnered with Perkins to deliver their donations because the school needed an organization that had been working on the ground across Iraq.
"Part of IRD's mission is to provide for the world's most vulnerable people, and being able to reach out to visually impaired students is an important part of that mission," Lanning said.
Morgan said literacy is essential for the blind to interact with others and Braille is essential for literacy.
"Students are not only learning to read and write, but they are interacting with the page. Braille is that liberating tool that allows them an instead feedback," he said.
Perkins has sent Braille equipment to 175 countries around the world since 1987, when it launched an international program to aid the blind in countries where there is often little help available to them.
"Far too often, we never imagine what is like to be without sight — to be in place where they devalue life because of your disability," Morgan said. "Education is the great equalizer to help those children, teacher and parents value life."
About Perkins School for the Blind
Perkins School for the Blind was founded in 1829 with six students, the first such school in the country.
There are 200 students at the Watertown campus, eight of whom hail from the Merrimack Valley and Southern New Hampshire, including two each from Andover and Lawrence.
Perkins School's most famous graduate is Helen Keller, who arrived with her teacher Annie Sullivan in 1888. She studied French, arithmetic and geography and enjoyed the embossed books at the library and the collection of bird and animal specimens at the tactile museum.
Keller officiated at the dedication of the Keller-Sullivan building in 1956.
RSS
Bookmark
