Paraclete associate Emely Wang ministers to the least of the “least of these,” the unseen, unheard, rarely thought of blind, deaf, and deafblind. She serves in African countries such as South Sudan, Kenya, and Tanzania utilizing Symbolic Universal Notation. The SUN system consists of textured objects that teach blind and deafblind students how to read Braille. Recently, she shared two stories with us:
“23-year-old Nelson Mandela was born blind, and despite the high hopes his parents had for him when they gave him such a name, he remained uneducated since his parents did not have the means to send him to a specialized school for the blind. He was brought to our workshop in Kenya, where a facilitator began to use textured objects and Symbolic Universal Notation (SUN) to teach him Braille. After seven days of instruction, Nelson was able to read Matthew 14 in Braille on an electronic Braille reading device. I asked a facilitator at the workshop, who was a veteran teacher of the blind and deafblind, how long it usually takes for someone to learn Braille. She said 4-6 months is the fastest, and sometimes a year. I asked her if she’d ever seen anyone learn Braille in 7 days. She said no.”
“Bernard was born 100% deaf and started losing his sight when he was six. At 23 years of age, he has now lost 95% of his sight. Doctors tell him that he will become completely blind soon. He was also at the workshop in Kenya, where his facilitator taught him the Braille alphabet using a new methodology combining textured objects with the sign language alphabet. After a few days of learning SUN words as well as learning the Braille letters and connecting them with the sign language alphabet, I asked the facilitator to show him a word in Braille he had not seen before in SUN and had never been exposed to in any other form. She chose the word “praise.” She showed him the Braille word “praise.” He read it and finger-spelled, “p-r-a-i-s-e.” Then he smiled, clasped his hands together, and shook them in front of his chest. His facilitator turned to me and said, “He just signed the word “praise.” When that was repeated with a dozen other words and also among the other two deafblind students, we realized that the “magic” that was happening was just the brain doing what it was created to do. Our brains were created to absorb language like a sponge is made to absorb water. If you give a sponge water, it sucks it up and springs to life because that’s what it was made to do. If you give a brain a language, it sucks it up and springs to life because it was made to look for language like a magnet looks for metal.”
