The jetliner dipped and yawed, jolting me from my half slumber and bouncing me into Jeff Evans, whose head was resting on my shoulder.
“Get off me,” I said. “I’m not your pillow.”
“Yeah, you are,” he said. “You jacked mine when I was sleeping.”
Jeff had been with me on Mount Everest, and I trusted him with my life. We’d slept in many tents together, but using my shoulder as a pillow was too much.
“My shoulder’s all wet,” I protested. “Have you been drooling on it?”
“Nah,” he scoffed. “That’s not drool. I spilled my Jack and Coke on you in the turbulence.”
“Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts,” the captain’s voice said through the speakers. “We’re heading into some rough air again.”
With that, I heard the movie come back on. It was Vertical Limit, ironically, a mountain-climbing film set in the Himalayas. As the plane bounced and dipped, Jeff began describing the entertaining yet absurd action scenes, avalanches thundering down the slope and climbers falling to their deaths.
Jeff chuckled and nudged me in the ribs. “The rescuers just leaped over a thirty-foot-wide, gaping crevasse and caught on the other side with the points of their ice axes.” He laughed. “Like that could ever happen!”
“I’ve done that a lot of times myself, dude,” I replied and then listened to a giant explosion on the screen. “What the heck was that?” I asked.
“A guy just threw a bomb made out of nitro, and the mountainside disintegrated,” Jeff answered. “Don’t ask me why. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Can’t remember if we brought any nitro,” I said.
“Yeah. Think we forgot that on the equipment list,” he retorted.
As overly dramatic as it all was, the high-altitude scenes got me thinking about the gravity of what we were about to do. I’d agreed to lead six of the teenagers from Sabriye’s school, Braille Without Borders, on an expedition, and this would be our first of two trips to Tibet. We couldn’t bring all thirty of Sabriye’s students, so she had handpicked four boys and two girls who had adventurous spirits, those who she thought were poised for great things in their lives. We would train the team in all the skills they’d need to know, and five months later, we’d return to make the climb together.
Ever since reading Sabriye’s letter, I had been struggling to find the bigger picture behind our goal. These blind kids were looked down on, shunned, and called blind fools. From Sabriye’s words, I knew this prejudice was based on ignorance and superstition. I had also witnessed something similar when I went to Mount Everest. We had climbed from the Khumbu region on the Nepal side, forty miles through remote Sherpa villages. At first the Sherpas didn’t want to climb with me. They thought I’d be unlucky, that my presence on the mountain could bring bad fortune to their families. One brave and well-respected Sherpa, Ang Pasang, who’d already climbed Mount Everest twice, finally stated, “I think we make our own karma,” and signed on with us. After that, other Sherpas quickly followed. The folklore of Mount Everest had progressed similarly. Up until the ’50s, no Sherpa would dream of even stepping into the high mountains. Their presence would anger Chomolungma—“Goddess Mother of Mountains,” into sending down a massive avalanche or unleashing an earthquake on the villages. And it worked the opposite way as well. Famine, drought, natural disasters, children being stillborn all could be attributed to the mountain god’s displeasure. It became the way to explain all the pain and suffering of a harsh, high-altitude existence. But in 1953, when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay came back from the summit of Mount Everest with no divine repercussions, the mythology began to collapse. The Sherpas who climbed Mount Everest in the modern world had become revered, like rock stars or professional athletes.
Tibet was at least fifty years behind Nepal, and life was still largely guided by superstition, especially the beliefs around disability and blindness. From what I’d read, Sabriye’s work had already begun paving the way out of ignorance. Her school and training center provided education and vocational preparation for a hundred blind students and adults. Education for the blind was still a revolutionary idea in the high plains of Tibet. I thought, What if we did something that could serve as a dramatic extension to Sabriye’s work? Something big, something that no one in the local villages would have ever dreamed of? So we’d hatched the goal of climbing Lhakpa Ri, a twenty-three thousand–foot peak on the north side of Mount Everest. Lhakpa Ri was considered one of the easier seven thousand–meter peaks in the world—but that was like saying you were going to swim with one of the friendliest great white sharks in the world. Still, I knew from my own experience that climbing a tall mountain and standing on top could take those perceptions about what was possible for the blind and break them apart. And maybe the bigness of that achievement could sink into the minds of Sabriye’s students and affect the trajectory of their entire lives. The boy in Sabriye’s letter, Gyenshen, was the only one in his village who knew the world was round, so maybe he could also be the only one to stand on the top of a twenty-three thousand–foot peak.
It was an ambitious plan, but I’d brought together the best team imaginable to guide these kids. Jeff Evans, sprawled out to my right, was a wild man, boasting 107 Grateful Dead shows and over 300 Widespread Panic shows, but I wanted him on my expeditions. He’d worked for the National Park Service on Denali rappelling out of helicopters into crevasses to retrieve injured climbers and, unfortunately, sometimes dead bodies. He was an emergency room physician assistant and also one of the most experienced people in the world in high-altitude medicine.
Across the aisle from us were mountain guides Charley Mace and Michael Brown, both also with me on Mount Everest. Charley had climbed K2—one of the most technically difficult climbs in the world, and Michael had climbed Everest three times. A year earlier, they’d gotten a blind guy to the summit of Mount Everest, through the two thousand feet of jumbled up boulders of ice called the Khumbu Icefall—a blind person’s worst nightmare. So if it could be done, these guys were the ones to make it happen.
I wanted to have a one-to-one ratio between guides and students to increase their safety, so I’d brought along three more mountaineers: Gavin Attwood, a loyal friend who had helped me train in the past and was great with logistics; Sally Berg, who’d done many Himalayan climbs; and Stefani Jackenthal, a well-traveled adventure journalist.
The other coup was that on hearing the idea, a friend had introduced me to Stephen Haft, one of the producers of the film Dead Poets Society. He, in turn, had introduced me to Sybil Robson, an aspiring filmmaker and philanthropist who had been so inspired by our project that she’d decided to fund a film, as well as the trip itself. I was on a high, excited that we could do this important work and also come away with a film that would bring attention to Sabriye’s work and our adventure together. A film would help a lot more people.
We entered our approach to Lhasa, and I heard, then felt, the landing gear release, as Vertical Limit ended with triumphant music. “If you didn’t notice,” Jeff said sarcastically, “they saved the day.”
Inside the Lhasa airport, I was excited to finally meet Sabriye Tenberken, Paul Kronenberg (the school’s cofounder), and the six students chosen for the expedition. The students were waiting just outside customs, separated from us by thick Plexiglas. “Hello, hello, Erik!” they screamed eagerly as they rapped their canes against the glass.
We rapped the glass and waved back.
We took a bus from the Lhasa airport down a long, straight avenue of honking horns, whining mopeds, and the whir of bike rickshaws as all the kids peppered us with questions. My long white cane was a topic of fascination, since it was a full head higher than the tallest of the teens. The bus slowed down and crawled through the city center. The two girls who would be on our expedition, Kyila and Sonam Bhumtso, surrounded me on my seat, already clinging to my arms. They must have had the route memorized, because they cheerfully called out destinations along the way.
“Jokhang Monastery,” they chimed, almost in unison.
Sabriye told us the Jokhang was arguably the most sacred monastery in Tibet and situated in the busiest section of Lhasa. The school was only a few hundred yards away. “This is by design,” she added. “If we want to change the way blind people are viewed and treated here, our school is perfectly located. Every day, thousands of pilgrims walk the Barkhor, a circle road around the Jokhang Temple. When the pilgrims see our students walking by themselves with their white canes, news of their ability to travel independently spreads across Tibet.”
We parked and walked a short distance, ducking under low-hanging wires. Dogs yipped at us from small courtyards in front of houses. At the entrance to the school grounds, Sabriye had me run my hands up the ornate Tibetan gate. I touched the two wooden pillars, about six feet apart. High above me, I could hear a solid archway, a confined sound that seemed to block the sky. On the left pillar, carved into the smooth wood, were the indentations of the Roman alphabet, the letters running downward. The Braille equivalent of each letter was carved beside it. On the other pillar were strange symbols that swooped and curved in shapes I didn’t recognize. Sabriye told us this was Tibetan Sanskrit. To the right were the corresponding Braille symbols. The Braille dots felt familiar, but the arrangements made no sense to me.
“That’s Tibetan Braille,” she added.
“Sabriye studied Tibetology at the University of Bonn in Germany,” Paul said. “When she discovered that there was no Tibetan script for the blind, she invented one. She combined the principles of the Braille system with the special features of Tibetan syllable-based script. Tibetan scholars have now adopted it.”
Once inside, we all stopped at the edge of a courtyard, and I could hear a group of kids kicking a soccer ball with a bell inside it. I listened to shouts and laughter as the jingle moved back and forth.
“When I first came to Tibet in the summer of 1997,” said Sabriye, “I rode horseback across the Tibetan Plateau. Everywhere I went, camping outside of villages, sleeping in barns, I met lots of blind people, but many were hidden away. Their houses were poorly ventilated, and they heated and cooked with blocks of yak dung. The smoke and soot from the fires, the extreme ultraviolet rays, plus cataracts and poor medical treatment contributed to a high percentage of blindness. But I learned there wasn’t a single school for blind people in Tibet. I decided that I would change that.”
“I met Sabriye that summer,” Paul chimed in, “when I was backpacking through Tibet. Most people back home thought her plan was ludicrous, but I was sold. When she was finally headed to Lhasa to start the school, she called to thank me for the support and say good-bye. I said, ‘What do you mean, good-bye? I’m coming with you!’ I quit my job as a mechanical engineer the next day and a week later joined her.”
Sabriye told me that, at first, getting through all the red tape was difficult because the Chinese government was suspicious of foreigners. She and Paul were forced to leave the country numerous times to renew their visas as they attempted to prove their only goal was to support the blind.
“There was suspicion from the Tibetan community as well,” she said. “They thought we might steal their children, but one morning we woke up and a blind child was dropped off at our doorstep. After that, word spread that a place existed where the blind would be cared for and educated, and many more began arriving.”
“In the beginning,” Paul reminisced, “we only had a bedroom that functioned as an office, a dormitory that also functioned as a dining hall, and a kitchen. We taught the students in a tent in the garden. But two years ago we built a new building that contained two dorms—one for girls, one for boys—three classrooms, a Braille production room, a medical massage training room, and a large terrace. It has been quite a transformation.”
They had made it seem so simple, so matter-of-fact. No Tibetan Braille code in existence? Then just invent one from scratch and open up literacy to a whole new population. No school for blind children? Then teach them in a yak herder’s tent. Get kicked out of the country by a suspicious bureaucracy? Then simply drive the thousand kilometers over pitted dirt roads and high mountain passes to wait it out for months in Nepal, and repeat this a half dozen more times until you’ve gained their trust. I was awestruck.
“Erik, why don’t you show the boys some of your wrestling moves?” Sabriye asked not ten minutes after stepping into the courtyard. She’d apparently told some of the boys about my high school wrestling career, and instantly, Tenzin, Dachung, and Gyenshen attacked me from all directions. They’d clearly planned the ambush. They were light and small and young—so I toyed with them, throwing them off pretty easily. But they kept coming. As we spun and battled, dogs yapped and younger kids cheered the three boys on. Two of them shot in on my legs, and the other leaped on my back, and I had to double my efforts. Then they released me, and it got quiet—too quiet—so I readied for another assault. They attacked again, but this time they wound one of our climbing ropes around my legs. Soon they got a few coils around my feet. They yanked the rope. It went tight, and I toppled over.
“Dude, you’re getting yak-tied by three little Tibetan kids!” Jeff called out, laughing.
With that, I began pouring it on, one hand fighting them off while the other furiously pulled the coils from around my ankles. These kids play to win, I thought. I popped up, arms outstretched in defense. Panting, I said, “Okay, I’m good. I don’t want to hurt you guys.”
One of my knees was skinned up, and wiping the grit out of the wound, I thought how tenacious and scrappy these guys were. Tenzin was deceptively strong for his diminutive size. He was all sinew, without an ounce of fat on him. His hands were vise grips, like he’d been doing hard physical labor all his short life.
“They got some moves,” I said, still fending them off at arm’s length.
“We stress mobility, orientation, and independence,” Sabriye said. “They should be able to look after themselves.” Her voice went higher with a little laugh—probably at the image of me being tied up.
I’d now spent time with the two girls, and the three bruisers I’d just tangled with, but the sixth teenager in the group, Tashi, had hung quietly in the background.
“Tashi,” Sabriye urged, “come over and talk to us.”
As if waiting for that prompting, Tashi stepped to my side. He was nineteen and the oldest of the group. His name meant Lucky. He was rail thin, gangly, awkward, and shy. It took him a while to stutter out his broken English. I learned he came from far away—according to Tashi, “A thousand miles away”—from a small village in China.
When Tashi left to begin his lessons, I asked Sabriye more about him, and she explained his background. When he was ten years old, his father took him on an outing to another village, but while there, they met with a Chinese couple. His father struck a bargain, and the couple whisked Tashi away. Over the next week, the couple drove him to Lhasa to beg for them on the streets. However, when he didn’t make enough money, they beat him and refused to give him food. This went on until Tashi couldn’t stand it anymore, and one evening after a day of begging he didn’t go back to the Chinese couple. He decided to take his chances alone on the streets of the Barkhor. Homeless, with no family, he roamed Lhasa, malnourished and in tattered clothes, until a Tibetan woman found him, took pity on him, and brought him to Sabriye’s school. I listened to the ball jingling across the courtyard and the stomp of small feet, and I knew there were a hundred more blind children with similar stories, whom Sabriye and Paul had saved from tragic fates.
Next, Sabriye and Paul toured us through the classrooms, designed by age groups: Tsitsi Dsindra, Mouse Class; Dah Dsindra, Tiger Class; and Rebong Dsindra, Rabbit Class. The classrooms were tidy, with neat rows of small desks with children plunking away on Braille typewriters. The walls were shelved with thick Braille books. Thumbing through them, I asked, “Where do you get all these books?”
“At first they were donated from Germany and America,” Paul replied, “but then we decided to create our own Braille printing press. The first step was easy, scanning the Tibetan books into digital text, but the second step was much harder. We had to develop a software program to translate digital Tibetan script into the Braille code Sabriye created, and it all prints out on a Braille embosser. With our Braille printing press, we now print books in English, Chinese, and Tibetan Braille.”
Gyenshen was already back working at his desk, manipulating the Braille keyboard on a computer, learning word processing and desktop publishing. Dachung, also adept at computing, was researching techniques of medical massage, an interest of his. Sonam Bhumtso was sliding her fingers across a Braille book written in Tibetan and working to translate it into English, while Kyila patiently helped the younger kids with their lessons.
“Our philosophy is very simple,” said Sabriye. “Blind people are discriminated against, and we try to give them an opportunity to learn. By learning, they get skills, and these skills give them value. When they are ready, they will leave here and integrate back into their villages. And when they are the only ones who can read and write, or can use a computer, or can translate three different languages for their families, they will no longer be disposable; they will be indispensable.”
As I listened to the busy sounds around me, I was hearing Sabriye’s philosophy coming to life. It was in the echo of long white canes tapping, in the clanking of Braille typewriters, in the mechanical drumming of the Braille printers, and especially in the whispering voices of children discussing their lessons and preparing for their futures.
The next morning, we began the preparation for our expedition. A sighted guide was assigned to each student, and we broke up and practiced navigating with trekking poles and following bear bells through an obstacle course we set up in the courtyard. Desks became boulders; two chairs with a broomstick laid across became a fallen tree to step over; a rolled-up Tibetan carpet became an open crevasse to leap over. Two children facing each other held the two ends of a white cane and lifted it up and down, simulating a dangerous rockfall zone where we’d need to hurry through. The game was for each duo to maneuver together through the course without touching any obstacles, stumbling into a crevasse, or being pegged by falling rocks. Teams would stop in front of the horizontal cane being raised and lowered, and the guide would scream, “Now!” and the kid would sprint through the gauntlet. The whole time, Jeff gave a string of running commentary like, “Dachung, you just disappeared down a slot … Tashi, too slow. That rock just took you out.”
Next, we unloaded piles of duffel bags and fitted the kids out with all the gear they’d need for the trip: layers of fleece, gloves, hats, and socks, down jackets and pants. We taught them how to strap crampons to their boots so they could walk on steep ice once we got high up on the glaciers.
The next three days, we visited the hillsides outside the city, assessing their skills and abilities and getting to know each other. We practiced setting up tents, packing and unpacking our backpacks, and tying essential knots. We demonstrated roping up and trekking as a unit. While roped together, we taught the kids how to do self-arrests. In case of a fall, the other members of the rope team needed to throw themselves down on the steep slope, dig their ice axes into the snow, and bring their rope mate to a stop.
Around a small juniper campfire that night, I sat next to Sonam Bhumtso and asked her questions about her life.
“She has very round cheeks,” Kyila said from the other side of the seat. “She like it when you squeeze them.”
I reached out, and Kyila was absolutely correct. I felt soft, round cheeks. They lifted, and I knew a broad smile had creased the space between them. Sonam was tiny, a full head shorter than Kyila. She came from the Gompo district in eastern Tibet, from a village of only seventeen families. Sonam Bhumtso meant a Hundred Thousand Beautiful Lakes, which she said was strange because she hated water and never learned to swim. “Lakes and rivers may be beautiful,” she said, “but I prefer to stay on dry land.”
Sonam went blind when she was four months old. Like Gyenshen, her family believed a Lu, a water demon, cursed her. “One day my uncle went fishing,” she said. “He caught two fish, and when he got home, he threw them into a container of water. My mother ladled some water out of it while she was cooking, but by mistake she also got hold of the fish, and they fell onto the cook fire. She looked for the fish everywhere but couldn’t find them. She said they burned up in the fire. This offended the gods, because right after that, I went blind. It was my uncle’s fault, because he caught the fish, but I was the one who had to pay. When I was little, I cried a lot. I was sad and angry because I didn’t belong and because I was different from the other children in my village. Before I went to school in Lhasa, I had few friends. The children teased me and threw stones at me. When my grandmother and the others went to tend the yaks, I stayed behind by myself. I cleaned the house, fed the other animals, and then I would sit in the garden to guard the cheese where it was laid out to dry. The crows love dried cheese. If they got too close, I chased them away. In the mornings I often heard the other children laughing and whistling on their way to school. I would get especially angry when they came back and held a book in front of my face and asked me to read it to them. Sometimes I played school all by myself. I would collect flat stones and scratch things on them. I pretended they were the letters of the alphabet. When the other children saw what I was doing, they laughed at me, took my stones, and threw them at me. After I went to school in Lhasa for one year, I was looking forward to going home again. I did not miss my family, but for a different reason. I took my Braille book back with me and held it up for the other children to see. I held it to their noses and said, ‘Why don’t you read something for me if you’re so smart?’”
At the punch line, the entire team actually cheered. I grabbed her small hand, folded her fingers under her thumb and into a fist, and guided my clenched knuckles to hers. “That’s a fist bump,” I said. “Then you open your hand, spread your fingers and palm upward, out to the sky, and go ‘Pow,’ like an explosion.” She tried a couple of times until she got it, and we all laughed.
On our return from the countryside, the six teens took us on a tour of the nearby Potala Palace, just a twenty-minute walk away, up a long series of stairs to the top of a thousand-foot hill overlooking the Lhasa Valley. This was the seat of the Tibetan government and where the Dalai Lama lived until 1959, when he escaped to India during the Tibetan uprising. It was a complex network of towers, temples, libraries, and golden stupas where the bodies of past lamas were enshrined. It comprised over a thousand rooms. The stone fortress sloped up at an inward angle, with walls more than fifteen feet thick at the base. The foundation was filled in with molten copper that had solidified to protect the palace from falling down during Tibet’s regular earthquakes.
Inside, we circled the monastery clockwise, spinning an endless chain of giant sacred prayer wheels, all intricately embossed on sheets of copper. Incense perfumed the air. The practice was supposed to unleash unlimited wisdom, love, and compassion and awaken one’s own highest potential, one’s Buddha nature. We all recited the mantra OM MANI PADME HUM—signifying the indivisibility of compassion and wisdom—and we were supposed to visualize pure white light rays emanating out from the spinning prayer wheel and spreading out to all sentient beings on its way to the universe as the light rays purified and healed the world. In Buddhism your level of success and happiness was enhanced, or harmed, by behavior in a past life.
So as we spun, we also built up our karma, a kind of cosmic merit system along the chain of many lives as we worked toward enlightenment.
During the tour, we learned the palace had been built over the ruins of a far more ancient temple, founded in A.D. 637 by the Chenrezig, the embodiment of love and compassion in Tibetan Buddhism. He is believed by Tibetans to be their “Adam,” the actual progenitor of their people. Legend said that when he attained enlightenment, he ascended to the top of Mount Pitaloka, a mythical mountaintop that means brilliance in Tibetan, where he dwells eternally. Before his ascent, he vowed that he would not rest until he had liberated all beings from all the realms of suffering. After working diligently at this task for a very long time, he looked out and realized the immense number of miserable beings yet to be saved. Seeing this, he became despondent, and his head split into thousands of pieces. Amitābha Buddha put the pieces back together as a body with very many arms and many heads so that Chenrezig could work with myriad beings all at the same time. Jeff described a painting of Chenrezig with eleven heads and many arms spreading out from his body.
After the tour, we relaxed for a while at the palace gardens, at the foot of the palace, beside a small lake. Prayer flags flapped in the wind up high, sending yet more prayers to the heavens. Ducks splashed and swam in the water just behind us. I sat down on a bench with seventeen-year-old Gyenshen. He told me he became blind at nine years old, unfortunately right after he’d received a scholarship to attend a prestigious school in Beijing. When the school learned he’d lost his eyesight, his scholarship was revoked. His family believed a serpent had cursed him, and they were so ashamed they locked him away in his home for three years. “My mother say I was the cleverest boy, but now the cleverest child has gone to waste. Without eyes, she say, a man is not complete. Once the school took me away, life was much easier for my family.”
I thought about the founder of the Potala Palace, Chenrezig, and the fact that, almost 1,500 years later, his mission was far from realized. Tibet seemed like a strange and contradictory place, a clash between sacred ideals and the harsh cruelties of the real world. Societal and cultural barriers in Tibet still demonized the blind. They were at the bottom of the caste system, often believed to be murderers in their past lives. They lived in a world where you could be enslaved, thrown out on the streets to freeze and beg, and locked in a dark room for years because your family was embarrassed by you. Hearing Gyenshen’s and the other kids’ stories, it was easy to understand how Chenrezig’s head split open with frustration and pain. Sabriye and Paul were one of his many arms, rescuing these kids, in many cases literally from the streets, and giving them hope, giving them something real, a sanctuary where they could feel loved and safe and connected, part of a family. It dawned on me that Sabriye and Paul were not just educating blind children; they were challenging an entire belief system.
Later, I sat in the center’s small office, drinking a cup of milk tea with Kyila and Sabriye. Kyila told me her name in Tibetan meant Happy. It seemed to fit her; her voice was light and expressive, like a smile was dancing through her words. She came from a small village ten hours by bus from Lhasa, and she had twin brothers, also both blind, who entered the school with her at the same time. Her father had lost his sight as well.
“It was very hard at home,” she said. “I sat around doing nothing. I couldn’t dress myself; I couldn’t eat by myself. My mother took care of all of us, but she went to hospital. She had a heart problem. She worried too much about my brothers and me. After one month in hospital, she wanted to tell me something, but she couldn’t speak anymore. I wanted to know what she was trying to say, and I wished, maybe for just five minutes if I could become sighted, I could see her face, and what it looked like just once. Then she died.”
Sabriye and I sat silently. There was nothing to say, and I thought that her name, Happy, contrasted with her stark early life.
“Then at twelve,” Kyila finally continued, “I learn about Miss Sabriye’s school, and my life change. I am here three years now.”
“It’s incredible what you’ve built here in just a few short years,” I added.
Sabriye reached out and touched my shoulder. “I feel like it was a long chain of events that have brought us all here,” she said. “When I went blind at twelve, my greatest fear was not having friends anymore. I still attended a sighted school and hadn’t learned to use a cane yet. I would ask the other children directions to class or to the bathroom, and they would tell me to keep walking straight. Then I would walk off a flight of stairs and fall to the bottom. I would hurt my ankle. Sometimes, I hit my head. Then they would laugh and hiss at me, calling me ‘Blindschleiche,’ a German curse word. It translates to blind snake.”
You didn’t have to live in Tibet to face hardship, I thought as I listened. I remembered a day after I’d gone blind, tapping my cane into the high school cafeteria. I always sat at the same table with my friends, but as I approached the table, they’d played a game and remained totally silent. I knew they were there from their quiet breathing, but I just walked away and sat alone at another table. Pain and humiliation had flushed from my head and through my entire body, like a poison. Cruelty was a trait that all humankind shared equally, I thought.
“After all the teasing and bullying,” Sabriye said, “I became so depressed, I was barely even speaking. I withdrew into my interior world. My mother decided that something had to change, and she took me out of school, far away, to an island on the North Sea. I remember sitting at the end of a dock overlooking the harbor, listening to a fierce windstorm. There were boats moored nearby, and their sails were snapping. Waves crashed against the shore, and I knew the storm was also inside of me. It was raging. That inner rage turned outward. It was the anger about myself, anger about my victimization, and anger about my former friends and teachers who didn’t understand that I was still the same person.”
At the end of that week, Sabriye and her mother agreed she would be better off at the Carl Strehl-Schule for the blind and partially sighted, where she quickly learned the teachers were far from overprotective. She rode tandem bikes, windsurfed, skied, and rode horseback, even jumping over fences.
Then Sabriye stood up from her desk chair and said, “I’d like to show you something,” and then led me down the hallway and across the courtyard. We stopped at the doorway of a quiet room, and Sabriye picked up her story where she’d left off.
“It was at the school for the blind that one of my teachers asked us what we wanted to do with our lives. What dreams did we have? The teacher encouraged us to think about it for a long time. I was sixteen and nearing the end of high school. I thought about my life, about people’s expectations of me. In Germany, people have very clear perceptions about what blind people can or cannot do. People kept telling me to go into psychology, or become a lawyer, to do something that had been done before by other blind people, but to me, it felt suffocating. I wanted to really live, to take risks and push toward unknown territory. I had read about Tibet, and for me, it was the most adventurous place I could imagine, undiscovered and filled with wilderness. And I determined to risk something, to live that kind of adventure, and do something meaningful. I didn’t know what that would look like exactly.”
Then she took my hand and pointed my finger into the room. “We do something similar here. We call this the ‘Dream Factory.’” We walked inside, and I touched the tapestries hanging on the walls that the kids had made; the woven patterns felt like hourglasses or figure eights. I could feel a big south window enveloping me in warmth as the sun climbed upward, and, outside, I could hear the honking of traffic and the markets coming to life. “Here in our Dream Factory,” Sabriye went on, a deep pride edging her voice, “we encourage our students to dream about what it is they want to do. They should not limit those dreams in any way. We then try to find ways to turn these dreams into reality.”
Sabriye, Kyila, and I sat down and leaned back against a soft Tibetan carpet laid over a thick mattress of straw. My arms rested on ornately stitched pillows. “We did Dream Factory,” Kyila said, “and Sabriye asked us what was our dream. It was such a strange question to me, because I didn’t know what was a dream. Sabriye made me think about it and answer, and I said I wanted to start a kindergarten, because I think every child should have a special childhood memory where you can make friends, be naughty, and play with other children. And not be home all alone, with no one.”
Like Sabriye, I’d grown up with defined rules of what a blind person could and could not do, and I knew what that blanket felt like as it lowered down and began to suffocate you. My whole life, I’d been trying to break free of it and do something bold and unexpected. After college, I’d traveled by bus across the United States to Phoenix, Arizona, to begin a job as a middle school teacher. It was exciting to be in charge of a classroom full of twenty eleven-year-olds. Many school principals had turned down my application on account that a blind teacher wasn’t safe, couldn’t maintain order, and wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the grading, but I’d thrived, teaching for six fulfilling years and feeling I just might do this forever. At the same time, I also got my first taste of climbing, ascending vertical rock pinnacles in the desert outside the city, and that had led to a dream even more on the edge. I was on the summit of one of those desert towers when I decided to pursue a life as a mountain climber. It was a bet that no venture capitalists would have banked on. However, Ellie had cashed in her life savings, $20,000, and moved with me to the Colorado Rockies where I’d begun training and trying to eke out a living as a full-time professional athlete and adventurer. I was able to get the attention of some outdoor sponsors, and those, combined with some paid speaking engagements, I hoped could support my expeditions. “It was my dream to climb the tallest mountain in every continent,” I said. “When I finished the Seven Summits, I read Sabriye’s letter, and then it was my dream to come here, to meet you, and be a part of this dream.”
In the distance, I could hear the rhythmic chug of a Braille printer. Ka-chung … ka-chung … ka-chung.
I saw it in my mind, rolling out thick stock paper embossed with Sabriye’s Tibetan Braille, thousands of Braille dots secretly lifting up off the pages and escaping out the window. I imagined them rising up into the sky and dissolving into the pure white light of the prayer wheel. And as that light spread through the world toward the heavens, hopes and dreams were born.