WSD's article in The Jakarta Post

Life isn’t over for the visually impaired

The Jakarta Post, Bandung | Tue, 10/19/2010 10:03 AM | The Archipelago

It never crossed Dudu Hafiz’s mind that his eyes would go bad. Born with normal vision, he was declared visually impaired when he was 22.

Since then, the 32-year-old has had to rely on his cane to get around. But life is not over for him.

The activist and his friends from the Syamsi Dhuha Foundation are now busy organizing programs to inform others about the importance of maintaining their vision. One such program was an event titled “Low Vision Goes to School”, which was recently held at SMA Taruna Bakti senior high school in Bandung, West Java.

For the 200 students and teachers at the school, Dudu shared information about how the blind or those with impaired vision use their canes to ask for help. They even played some empathy games.

In one game he asked students to walk around wearing a blindfold.

One student, M. Fauzie, said he found it difficult to walk while blindfolded.

“I’m grateful that I was born with normal sight. I can walk freely without being afraid of hitting anything,” he said.

Dudu visited the school to commemorate World Sight Day 2010, which was on Oct. 14.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 40 to 45 million people in the world were blind, one third of those from Southeast Asia.

The organization said that every minute a child in the world goes blind, and half of those are children in Southeast Asia. The WHO also predicted that 1.4 million babies will suffer from blindness, three-fourths from poor regions in Asia and Africa.

On Sept. 30, 1999, the WHO launched “Vision 2020: The Right to Sight”, a global initiative to help eliminate preventable visual impairments and blindness.

“Eighty percent of the world’s blind population can actually be cured,” said Syamsi Dhuha Foundation manager Shiane Hanako, who initiated the “Low Vision Goes to School” program.

She said it was for this reason that every year World Sight Day was commemorated by events such as the one in Bandung.

“These students have the potential to be our leaders. We should teach them to care about those with impaired vision,” Shiane said, adding that such events taught students about impaired vision.

“Impaired vision is not blindness. People living with it still have a tiny bit of sight that they use to live their daily lives, go to school and make a living,” said Dian Syarief, head of the Syamsi Dhuha Foundation, who herself suffers from impaired vision.

Impaired vision can be congenital, caused by an infection, lack of Vitamin A, tumors, trauma or progressive eye disease, she said.

“The number of people with impaired vision, about 135 million, is even larger than those who are blind,” she added