[Skinwalker]

It may be 'a man's world' according to James Brown's song, but he also
countered most eloquently with 'but it would be nothing, nothing, without a woman or a girl'.

This thread is to celebrate the remarkable women that have graced this world with their presence and their achievements. If you would like to share your stories of remarnkable women, please post them here.

To begin, I would like to celebrate one of the most remarkable women I have come across, Sabriye Tenberken.

"People tried to put limits on me, but limits always show opportunities. I persisted because I believed it was possible."



She was just 26 years old and blind when she rode into Tibet (on horseback, no less!) to found a school where blind children could learn to read braille, speak three languages, take care of themselves, teach each other, and put a joyous new spin on the idea of the blind leading the blind.

Sabriye Tenberken walks fast and with authority. As we stride up a narrow street, a little girl sitting on a stoop spots Tenberken through the crowd, springs to her feet, and crows at the top of her lungs, "Xia ze lai le!" A simple Chinese sentence, it means, "Gangway! Here comes an idiot!"

In the seven years Sabriye's spent living in Tibet—and indeed in the 27 in her native Germany before that—she's been the object of this phrase, and worse, countless times. Sabriye Tenberken (pronounced Sah-bree-yah Ten-BURR-ken) single-handedly has brought literacy to the blind people of Tibet. In founding the Lhasa-based Braille Without Borders*, the region's first rehabilitation and training center for the blind, she has inspired nothing short of a revolution in their status, their thinking, their future. She and her partner in life, Paul Kronenberg, who handles much of the practical work of the school, have been knighted by the Dutch queen. She has also won numerous honors and awards for her work. She is hardly an idiot. "You cannot insult me with blindness," she says, "because I'm proud to be blind." These days epithets leave her unfazed; they didn't always.

Born with a degenerative retinal disease, Tenberken was blind by 12. In her early years, she was able to make out faces, colors, landscapes, but her vision was highly impaired, and as a result her schoolteachers approached her with what she felt was a patronizing deference that set her apart. Her classmates spurned and taunted her. Determined to fit in, Tenberken denied her blindness to herself and worked overtime to hide it.


Sitting in the bright offices of Braille Without Borders, now in its seventh year, Tenberken leans forward and says, "Not accepting that I was blind was miserable. … I was constantly compensating and pretending." She pauses to think and with visible emotion adds, "Not until I accepted my blindness did I begin to live."

Tenberken enrolled at a boarding school for the blind, where among academic subjects the students were taught horseback riding, swimming, white-water rafting, braille, and, above all, self-reliance. "Suddenly, I was one among many," she tells me. "I had friends. I was equal and happy. … I thought, 'Okay. I may be ugly and blind, but I have a brain. I can do things.'"

Tenberken majored in central Asian studies at the University of Bonn, the only blind student out of 30,000. There, several professors tried to dissuade her from studying the difficult Tibetan language. There were no Tibetan texts available in braille. Using the system of rhythmic spelling Tibetans employ to memorize their complex language, Tenberken created her own method of translating the Tibetan language into braille. She compiled a Tibetan-German/German-Tibetan dictionary, and eventually, Tenberken helped to devise a software system that enabled her to transpose entire Tibetan texts into formally printed braille, a feat no one before had ever accomplished.

"I developed this system for my own use," she says, "but when I realized that blind people in Tibet could also benefit from it, I got the idea to bring it here and start a school." Rejected by several development organizations, who saw her blindness as too great a liability, Tenberken resolved to make the project happen on her own. In 1997, at the age of 26, much to the dismay of everyone but her immediate family, she traveled alone to China, took an intensive course in Chinese, then proceeded to Tibet, where she learned that more than 30,000 of Tibet's 2.6 million people are blind—about twice the global rate. While poor diet and unhygienic conditions are factors, Tibet's main cause of blindness is its high elevation; at this altitude the intensity of the sun's ultraviolet rays causes damage to the unprotected eye.


Tenberken discovered a deep prejudice against the blind in Tibet, where blindness is considered punishment for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life. For centuries Tibet's blind have been shunned, vilified, and generally treated as subhuman. When Tenberken first arrived, she found not a single institution or organization geared to provide assistance for the region's blind—clearly a result of this deep-seated fear and opprobrium.

Tenberken decided to travel through remote areas of the countryside, visiting rural villages, spreading the word about her braille system, assessing the situation of blind children there. When she concluded that the best way to do this was on horseback, there were more howls of protest from the skeptics. Nevertheless she set off with three supportive companions, two of whom were Tibetan, riding from village to village, across high mountain passes, through flooded rivers. What she found appalled her: isolated, disrespected, sometimes beaten, abandoned, or turned out in the streets to beg, almost all were illiterate and uneducated. When villagers saw Tenberken walking, riding a horse, they refused at first to believe she was blind. Tenberken persuaded them that though blind, their children, too, could ride horses, read, and write. One astounded father told her, "The prospect of your school is like a dream for us."

At the moment, there are 37 students—ranging in age from 3 to 19—in residence at the school, as well as six trained teachers and five staff members, but new students arrive regularly. I ask Tenberken how the school survives without charging tuition or boarding fees. At the mention of finances, she smiles ruefully. "It costs about $2,000 per month to run the project. It's not a lot, but by the end of this year we may find we're out of funds."


Tenberken, who used $20,000 of her own money to start the school, spends a great deal of time applying for grants, making speeches, and traveling to raise funds from private individuals. Though the project has gained international renown and the school receives close to 5,000 curious visitors a year, donations are often not forthcoming. Tenberken drops her cane on the ground by her feet, tucks her hands between her knees, lifts her face to the sky. "The main reason people don't give us money is that we don't raise funds with pity." She believes that presenting her students as pitiable simply furthers the prejudice against them. "We've learned that you'll get funding if people feel sorry for you, but the perception of your capabilities will never change."

Tenberken says that when students first arrive at the school, they often object to being asked to learn and participate in school tasks. "They say, ‘I'm blind! I can't do that.' But when they see the other kids working hard, they change their views." The students are helping each other, not passively waiting to be told what to do.

[Skinwalker]

Tenberken smiles. "That's always been my hope. I've never liked the word help in the sense of the Samaritan. I never wanted just to come here as a Western person and help the blind by telling them what to do. I learn from them. We combine our experiences. I am one of them, and it's their project as much as it is mine." Tenberken aims to teach the blind how to integrate themselves into their communities, how to educate the sighted in what it means to be blind. "I believe that changes in the community's perception of the blind should radiate from the blind themselves. When our children return to their villages, they know many new things their own families have never learned. In many villages, the families don't speak Chinese or English; the returning blind child is able to translate for them. He returns with a new value; for the first time he's seen as useful."

I ask Tenberken if students ever object to returning to their villages. "That happens," she says. "And sighted people always say to me, ‘You see? You alienated them from their world.' Believe me, I've thought about this a lot. But this isn't alienation. It's simply life." Upon completing their preliminary education at BWB, students can opt to return to their villages, attend a normal school with sighted children, or train for a vocation such as medical massage, animal husbandry, cheesemaking, or farming. Tenberken's ultimate goal is to establish an international training center in Kerala, India, where blind people from all over the developing world can learn the management skills necessary to establish their own schools and training centers for the blind.

Though highly self-confident, Tenberken admits that the task of setting BWB on its feet was the hardest thing she's ever done. The bureaucratic resistance from government authorities, the difficulty of raising funds, the doubts of people who objected to her ideas, were nearly overwhelming. "In the beginning it was horrible. But the obstacles made us stronger. People tried to put limits on me, but limits always show opportunities. I persisted because I believed it was possible."
Braille Without Borders
Interview

[Skinwalker]

Helen Keller



Helen Keller was a remarkable woman, born in 1880 and died in 1968 at the age of 88. At age two, she contracted an illness that left her blind, deaf, unable to speak, and was considered backwards of intelligence. She lived in a dark and hopeless world of her own, until age 7, when she was placed in the care of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Through being taught letters spelt out in her hand, she came to realise the correlation between those words and their meaning. From then on, using her dogged persistence, she went on to bring forth her intellectual and emotional abilities, being an avid learner, and despite the social obstacles of her time, became the first deaf/blind person to graduate from college. As an adult, she travelled the world, campaigned for civil rights, world peace, human dignity and women's rights, and authored many books and essays. She became a prominent figure in her lifetime, whose accomplishments attracted awe, respect, admiration and inspiration.


The story of Helen Keller is the story of a child who, at the age of 18 months, was suddenly shut off from the world, but who, against overwhelming odds, waged a slow, hard, but successful battle to reenter that same world. The inarticulate little deaf and blind girl grew into a highly intelligent and sensitive woman who wrote, spoke, and labored incessantly for the betterment of others. So powerful a symbol of triumph over adversity did she become that she has a definite place in the history of our time and of times to come.
Helen Adams Keller was born, physically whole and healthy, in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880 in a white, frame cottage called "Ivy Green."



The illness that struck the infant Helen Keller and left her deaf and blind, was diagnosed as brain fever at the time; perhaps it was scarlet fever. Popular belief had it that the disease left its victim an idiot. And as Helen Keller grew from infancy into childhood, wild, unruly, and with little real understanding of the world around her, this belief was seemingly confirmed.


Patty Duke as Helen Keller in the Miracle Worker

Helen Keller's real life began on a March day in 1887 when she was a few months short of seven years old. On that day, which Miss Keller was always to call "The most important day I can remember in my life," Anne Mansfield Sullivan came to Tuscumbia to be her teacher. Miss Sullivan, a 20-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, who had regained useful sight through a series of operations, had come to the Kellers through the sympathetic interest of Alexander Graham Bell. From that fateful day, the two--teacher and pupil--were inseparable until the death of the former in 1936.

How Miss Sullivan turned the near savage child into a responsible human being and succeeded in awakening her marvelous mind is familiar to millions, most notably through William Gibson's play and film, The Miracle Worker, Miss Keller's autobiography of her early years, The Story of My Life, and Joseph Lash's Helen and Teacher.



Miss Sullivan began her task with a doll the children at Perkins had made for her to take to Helen. By spelling "d-o-l-l" into the child's hand, she hoped to teach her to connect objects with letters. Helen quickly learned to make the letters correctly, but did not know she was spelling a word, or that words existed. In the days that followed she learned to spell a great many more words in this uncomprehending way.

One day she and "Teacher"--as Helen always called her--went to the outdoor pump. Miss Sullivan started to draw water and put Helen's hand under the spout. As the cool water gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word "w-a-t-e-r" first slowly, then rapidly. Suddenly, the signals had meaning in Helen's mind. She knew that "water" meant the wonderful cool something flowing over her hand. Quickly, she stopped and touched the earth and demanded its letter name and by nightfall she had learned 30 words.

Thus began Helen Keller's education. She proceeded quickly to master the alphabet, both manual and in raised print for blind readers, and gained facility in reading and writing. In 1890, when she was just 10, she expressed a desire to learn to speak. Somehow she had found out that a little deaf-blind girl in Norway had acquired that ability. Miss Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School was her first speech teacher.

Even when she was a little girl, Helen Keller said, "Someday I shall go to college." And go to college she did. In 1898 she entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies to prepare for Radcliffe College. She entered Radcliffe in the fall of 1900 and received her bachelor of arts degree cum laude in 1904. Throughout these years and until her own death in 1936, Anne Sullivan was always by Helen's side, laboriously spelling book after book and lecture after lecture, into her pupil's hand.

Helen Keller's formal schooling ended when she received her B.A. degree, but throughout her life she continued to study and stayed informed on all matters of importance to modern people. In recognition of her wide knowledge and many scholarly achievements, she received honorary doctoral degrees from Temple University and Harvard University and from the Universities of Glasgow, Scotland; Berlin, Germany; Delhi, India; and Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was also an Honorary Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland.

[Songbird]

Awesome threads Skinwalker. Had never heard about Sabriye though. MashaAllah, what a lady. Such dedication.

And as for Miss Keller - well, I've long been a fan of hers.

Great thread.

[Skinwalker]

Anne Sullivan's marriage, in 1905, to John Macy, an eminent critic and prominent socialist, caused no change in the teacher-pupil relationship. Helen went to live with the Macys and both husband and wife unstintingly gave their time to help her with her studies and other activities.

While still a student at Radcliffe, Helen Keller began a writing career that was to continue on and off for 50 years. In 1902, The Story of My Life, which had first appeared in serial form in the Ladies Home Journal, appeared in book form. This was always to be the most popular of her works and today is available in more than 50 languages, including Marathi, Pushtu, Tagalog, and Vedu.

Miss Keller's other published works include Optimism, an essay; The World I Live In; The Song of the Stone Wall; Out of the Dark; My Religion; Midstream--My Later Life; Peace at Eventide; Helen Keller in Scotland; Helen Keller's Journal; Let Us Have Faith; Teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy; and The Open Door.

In addition, she was a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, writing most frequently on blindness, deafness, socialism, social issues, and women's rights. She used a braille typewriter to prepare her manuscripts and then copied them on a regular typewriter.

During her lifetime, Helen Keller received awards of great distinction too numerous to recount fully here. An entire room, called the Helen Keller Room, is devoted to their display at the American Foundation for the Blind in New York City. These awards include Brazil's Order of the Southern Cross; Japan's Sacred Treasure; the Philippines' Golden Heart; Lebanon's Gold Medal of Merit; and her own country's highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Most of these awards were bestowed on her in recognition of the stimulation her example and presence gave to work for the blind in those countries. In 1933 she was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. During the Louis Braille Centennial Commemoration in 1952, Miss Keller was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor at a ceremony in the Sorbonne.

Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan and alexander Graham Bell

More rewarding to her than the many honors she received, were the acquaintances and friendships Helen Keller made with most of the leading personalities of her time. There were few world figures, from Grover Cleveland to Charlie Chaplin, Nehru, and John F. Kennedy, whom she did not meet. And many, among them Katharine Cornell, Van Wyck Brooks, Alexander Graham Bell, and Jo Davidson, she counted as friends. Two friends from her early youth,
Helen keller and Mark Twain

Mark Twain and William James, expressed beautifully what most of her friends felt about her. Mark Twain said, "The two most interesting characters of the 19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller." William James wrote, "But whatever you were or are, you're a blessing!"



As broad and wide ranging as her interests were, Helen Keller never lost sight of the needs of her fellow blind and deaf-blind. From her youth, she was always willing to help them by appearing before legislatures, giving lectures, writing articles, and above all, by her own example of what a severely handicapped person could accomplish. When the American Foundation for the Blind, the national clearinghouse for information on blindness, was established in 1921, she at last had an effective national outlet for her efforts. From 1924 until her death she was a member of the Foundation staff, serving as counselor on national and international relations. It was also in 1924 that Miss Keller began her campaign to raise the "Helen Keller Endowment Fund" for the Foundation. Until her retirement from public life, she was tireless in her efforts to make the Fund adequate for the Foundation's needs.

Of all her contributions to the Foundation, Miss Keller was perhaps most proud of her assistance in the formation in 1946 of its special service for deaf-blind persons. She was, of course, deeply concerned for this group of people and was always searching for ways to help those "less fortunate than myself."

Helen Keller was as interested in the welfare of blind persons in other countries as she was for those in her own country; conditions in the underdeveloped and war-ravaged nations were of particular concern. Her active participation in this area of work for the blind began as early as 1915 when the Permanent Blind War Relief Fund, later called the American Braille Press, was founded. She was a member of its first board of directors.

When the American Braille Press became the American Foundation for Overseas Blind (now Helen Keller International) in 1946, Miss Keller was appointed counselor on international relations. It was then that she began the globe-circling tours on behalf of the blind for which she was so well known during her later years. During seven trips between 1946 and 1957 she visited 35 countries on five continents. In 1955, when she was 75 years old, she embarked on one of her longest and most grueling journeys, a 40,000-mile, five-month-long tour through Asia. Wherever she traveled, she brought new courage to millions of blind people, and many of the efforts to improve conditions among the blind abroad can be traced directly to her visits.

During her lifetime, Helen Keller lived in many different places--Tuscumbia, Alabama; Cambridge and Wrentham, Massachusetts; Forest Hills, New York, but perhaps her favorite residence was her last, the house in Westport, Connecticut she called "Arcan Ridge." She moved to this white, frame house surrounded by mementos of her rich and busy life after her beloved "Teacher's" death in 1936. And it was Arcan Ridge she called home for the rest of her life. "Teacher's" death, although it left her with a heavy heart, did not leave Helen alone. Polly Thomson, a Scots woman who joined the Keller household in 1914, assumed the task of assisting Helen with her work. After Miss Thomson's death in 1960, a devoted nurse-companion, Mrs. Winifred Corbally, assisted her until her last day.

Helen Keller made her last major public appearance in 1961 at a Washington, DC, Lions Clubs Meeting. At that meeting she received the Lions Humanitarian Award for her lifetime of service to humanity and for providing the inspiration for the adoption by Lions International of their sight conservation and aid to blind programs. During that visit to Washington, she also called on President Kennedy at the White House. After that White House visit, a reporter asked her how many of our presidents she had met. She replied that she did not know how many, but that she had met all of them since Grover Cleveland!

After 1961, Helen Keller lived quietly at Arcan Ridge. She saw her family, close friends, and associates from the American Foundation for the Blind and the American Foundation for Overseas Blind, and spent much time reading. Her favorite books were the Bible and volumes of poetry and philosophy.

Despite her retirement from public life, Helen Keller was not forgotten. In 1964 she received the previously mentioned Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1965, she was one of 20 elected to the Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair. Miss Keller and Eleanor Roosevelt received the most votes among the 100 nominees.

Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968, at Arcan Ridge, a few weeks short of her 88th birthday. Her ashes were placed next to her beloved companions, Anne Sullivan Macy and Polly Thomson, in the St. Joseph's Chapel of Washington Cathedral. On that occasion a public memorial service was held in the Cathedral. It was attended by her family and friends, government officials, prominent persons from all walks of life, and delegations from most of the organizations for the blind and deaf.

In his eulogy, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama expressed the feelings of the whole world when he said of Helen Keller, "She will live on, one of the few, the immortal names not born to die. Her spirit will endure as long as man can read and stories can be told of the woman who showed the world there are no boundaries to courage and faith."

[Songbird]

Originally Posted by Skinwalker

I bought a card like this once for a friend.

I also love this:

One can never consent to creep, when one feels the impulse to soar.

And this *sigh*:

I remember the morning that I first asked the meaning of the word, "love." This was before I knew many words. I had found a few early violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to kiss me: but at that time I did not like to have any one kiss me except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, "I love Helen."

"What is love?" I asked.

She drew me closer to her and said, "It is here," pointing to my heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it.

I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in signs, a question which meant, "Is love the sweetness of flowers?"

"No," said my teacher.

Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on us.

"Is this not love?" I asked, pointing in the direction from which the heat came. "Is this not love?"

It seemed to me that there could be nothing more beautiful than the sun, whose warmth makes all things grow. But Miss Sullivan shook her head, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I thought it strange that my teacher could not show me love.

Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, "Think."

In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.
For a long time I was still ... trying to find a meaning for "love" in the light of this new idea. The sun had been under a cloud all day, and there had been brief showers; but suddenly the sun broke forth in all its southern splendour.

Again I asked my teacher, "Is this not love?"

"Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out," she replied. Then in simpler words than these, which at that time I could not have understood, she explained:

"You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play."

The beautiful truth burst upon my mind — I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.

[zzze]

assalamu alaykum

wow, amazing thread, thank you

[Arabesque]

Wonderful thread!

Sabriye's story is like a modern-day Helen Keller miracle. Very impressive.

Is she of Turkish origin, because that's definitely not a Western name. That's an Arabic/Muslim name. Not that her origin matters, but it would be nice to have a role model of our own.

[Songbird]

Originally Posted by Arabesque

Is she of Turkish origin, because that's definitely not a Western name. That's an Arabic/Muslim name. Not that her origin matters, but it would be nice to have a role model of our own.

It definitely sounds Turkic - I thought the same.

But I'd like to correct you - we do have role models of our own - the blessed Umm al-Mu'mineen [raA]

Here are a few more pearlers from Helen Keller:

The Simplest Way to be Happy (1933)

• Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.

• A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

• It all comes to this: the simplest way to be happy is to do good.

• If we spend the time we waste in sighing for the perfect golden fruit in fulfilling the conditions of its growth, happiness will come, must come. It is guaranteed in the very laws of the universe. If it involves some chastening and renunciation, well, the fruit will be all the sweeter for this touch of holiness.

• Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

[Variable]

I was coming into this thread with a big poster of Jessica Alba and some smart-ass remark on her fine work in Fantastic Four.

Then I read some stories... and now I feel like a jerk.

[Bluestar]

We have some amazing men in this world too. It is difficult when society assumes all responsibility should primarily be a mans. Some people i have met on islamica and elsewhere will always have my respect because of their kindness and gentility

[TariqBinSleepin]

Mother Teresa? Just curious...