Bailey Without Borders
Bailey Without Borders is a Tibet based non-profit school for blind children.
|
I came to know those adorable Tibetan children on my trip to Tibet during the summer of 2013. I met a photographer, who had been taking photos of those children for more than ten years there, and he introduced me to those children.
Unlike how I thought of them at first, they were really bright and optimistic boys and girls. Even though some of them were just eight or ten, they already had a lot of dreams. I remembered there was one girl who came to me and greeted me shyly. After talking with her for a while, she told me that she wanted to study in an university and become a teacher in the future. Those blind children's parents might have given up on their lives, but these children never stop fighting their seemingly destined fate". As children, they were afraid of my camera at first, especially when they heard the click sound of the camera button. However, after I told them that they all looked great in the photos, they started to come over to me and voluntarily posed for my camera. These children are not naturally blind. Diseases and direct sunshine are the two common reasons that result in their blindness. To my surprise, these children never complain about their lives. Instead of being gloomy about their miserable fate, they decide to live positively every day and hope to fight against the social prejudice that holds against them. Summer of 2014
I was amazed by those blind children and the stories behind their smiles, so I went to their original campus in Shigatse, Tibet last year and taught the children as a volunteer for around one week. That trip made me know more about these children and how they strived in order to survive in this cruel society. For some blind adults who graduated from the Tibetan school for Blind Children, they chose to stay in the campus and learned to make bread and cheese for sale. Some of them even became the teachers of the school. The children there were also really independent even though they were not even over ten years old. No matter where I walked, I could always see children helped one another other. The ones with a slight vision often helped those that couldn't see anything. However, I realized that not many of them actually had a concept of the world after teaching them for a few days. This interaction with those children made me think about the contributions I could make in order to let more people know about those children and let those children know that all people around the world actually care about them. Because of this thought, I decided to host this photo exhibition so that I could use teens' art abilities to fundraise and meanwhile, introduce this Tibetan School for Blind School to people living in America. |
A peek into their daily lives:The Tibetan School for Blind School is currently run by a blind principal and 80% of the teachers there are also blind.
The picture on the right hand side shows a teacher at the school massaging the photographer who introduced me to this blind school. If you would like to check out more photos of the blind school. Please come to our photo exhibition "Eyes"! |