School for the blind reopens after a decade

Moving fingers swiftly across on his battered Braille book, Mohammad Ali aged 12 reads a Dari poem entitled "school makes a human complete". Among tens of thousands of blind people in the war-ravaged country, Ali is a student at Afghanistan's only school for the blind. "I want to learn knowledge and serve other blind children in the country that are deprived of education," the third-grade student of the newly reconstructed High School for the Blind told IRIN in the capital, Kabul. Located in the west of the city, the special school was destroyed during the civil war, but was recently rehabilitated by the International Assistance Mission (IAM), a leading international aid organisation assisting with eye care in Afghanistan. The reconstruction of the school premises has proven a major accomplishment. "The school was badly destroyed in 1993 when the civil war emerged, and it has been operating in a rented premises in Shahr-e Now near Kabul since then," Merial Carboni, an IAM project leader, told IRIN, noting that the school had been rehabilitated with the support of the United Nations Children's Fund, the Italian government and the German NGO Kinder Not Hilfe. IAM, which has been working in Afghanistan for over 30 years, said available data indicated a disproportionately high level of blindness and vision problems in Afghanistan. "Mostly in Afghanistan, malnutrition, childhood disease, intermarriage, cataracts, trachoma, refractive error, glaucoma and eye trauma are the major causes of blindness," Carboni said, noting that many of the blind were children with genetic disorders related to intermarriage, which remains common throughout Afghanistan. The blindness prevalence rate in the country is between 1.5 and 2 percent, as estimated by the World Health Organisation and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness - one of the highest in the world. "There are a total of 95 students at the school, many of them children who have been blind from birth," Ali Saberi, the headmaster of the school, told IRIN. He added that there were also 10 students who had lost their sight as a result of rocket or mine explosions. The school follows the curriculum of the education ministry and the same textbooks, converted to Braille, are used.

The challenges ahead for the blind require a firm commitment for education and social integration

An important spin-off was that the rehabilitation of the school was providing work for Kabul's blind. "In the past, blind people had traditionally been either Koran reciters or doing manual jobs if they could find one," Baqi Baryal of the Afghan Association of the Blind told IRIN. Baryal, who had lost his eyes and one leg in a mine explosion over a decade ago, stressed that with help blind people could take an active part in society. "The blind are completely isolated from what is happening outside the walls of their homes," Habibullah Bedarman, a teacher at the school, emphasised. He called on the UN and the Afghan government to integrate blind people more fully into community and political life. The UN's Comprehensive Disabled Afghans Programme (CDAP) said it was trying to better assist blind people now that conflict had subsided. "Yes, we as CDAP were not very active in addressing the blind until recently, but since last year we have been more involved in providing home based training for blind people in major cities of Afghanistan," Dr Majid Turmusani of CDAP told IRIN, adding that job opportunities and integration were just as important to blind people as education.