Category: Uncategorized

Blind on the Inside

By Dawn M. Sanders

I ‘see’ from the latest news headlines that: the judge presiding over the man who shot Michael Brown, a Black unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri in the deep South of the US, has decided against all reason, not to indict the police officer who perpetrated the murder.

Michael was just eighteen when he was shot and apparently lay for four and a half hours in the streets – having died from the bullet.
He was just a little older than what my son is now and had his whole life in front of him.

No reason has ever been given as to why the young man was shot so randomly – he hadn’t committed an offense, but… His skin was black within a hotbed of long-standing, deep-rooted racism running through the deep southern United States.

Why am I writing about this and why can I empathise with the plight and struggle for people of colour and open contempt for them?
Because… I’m severely visually impaired and, when I went to school and grew up in Southern California, in what could be dubbed the “post-segregated era” of the ‘70s and ‘80s, parents still didn’t want their white kids hanging out with the black or Mexican-American kids.
Everybody tended to “stick to their own” and if you didn’t, you were seen as rebelling or some kind of deviant.
I remember when my mother freaked out when I was twelve and had a boyfriend who was black – Rodney was sweet and, why shouldn’t I – I just didn’t ‘get the blind prejudice’ especially from a woman who was half Mexican herself.
Yet my mother seemed to subscribe to the whole ‘white is right’ mentality of so-called middle-class America – even though, we were anything but middle-class, as she raised five of us on her own on welfare benefits.

Growing up severely visually impaired, shunned in the playground, at football games or at lunch tables, I always hung just about where I could squeeze in, which was with the kids of colour, be it black or Mexican, or just with the geeks and rejects…
I always secretly felt: I could relate more with the kids of colour, because they had it harder, they were disadvantaged and many of their parents too, were uneducated as my mother had been.

I’m constantly faced with people who are “blind on the inside”. People look at me and see a white stick before a woman; people presume I don’t clean my house – that someone else does it; people assume I need help getting on a bus, even though I bloody walked to the bus stop; people presume, I can’t make a cup of tea in a self-serve café; people avoid speaking to me and stick to people they can make eye contact with; people presume, the only way to communicate with me, is by “helping me”; yes, I only ‘need help’ – not love and friendship like the rest of society. I consider every one of these kinds of people blind on the inside!
Just as Bijan Stephen wrote about: I’ve been refused entry to nightclubs: “because of health and safety” the all-prevailing excuse of the twenty-first century, on the assumption that: if you’re severely visually impaired you “can’t see what’s going on and might get hurt.”
Yet, these people: from nightclub managers, to policemen to judges, use and abuse their power to systematically dis-empower others because they’re blind on the inside, but clever enough on the outside to get to where they are: in high places where they can look down atop the hierarchy of society with a bad sense of vertigo when they spot any form of ‘difference, person of colour or something that doesn’t blend in with the mundane mediocrity that constitutes what is “normal or okay.”

Inspired by
Bijan Stephen:
http://fastcolabs.com/3039094/today-in-tabs/today-in-tabs-i-will-only-bleed-here

Our Lucky Children

Night before last I walked into our open-plan living room/dining room and put dinner on the table for my son and I. Then I heard the story on Channel 4’s Unreported World: they were talking of a school for deaf children. I immediately plucked up my ears, as my lad is deaf, I wondered about what they were featuring. The journalist (I can’t remember who covered the story) said how she was inspired – having learned a few signs in connecting with the students. I wondered what school they were featuring – then she finally said, Uganda, and I thought: ‘oh’! She spoke of how many of the kids had come from abusive backgrounds and homes, just because they were deaf and the only safe place for them where they could communicate at all, was the school. I thought: that wasn’t too dissimilar from what I used to observe at my son’s old special school in Manchester – there were parents who had court orders not to see their kids and they had either been dumped there with no choice but to be inevitably institutionalised. There were of course, parents who supported their children at this school, but the clincher was, they had to take a rigorous exam to win tuition into a secondary school for the deaf. For the primary school which was featured on the programme, I didn’t catch whether parents had to pay for it or not – I walked in in the middle of the story. Some of the children had English names like Peter – some had African names. Many children in Uganda are too poor to go to school at all, so I’m assuming the ones which made it to this school were lucky to have been able to go. The reporter pointed out how, representatives from the school scouted the outer most villages in the countryside, for deaf children who were missing out on school and an education – not to mention the chance for communication through sign language. When my lad got the place at Manchester School for the Deaf (now Seashell Trust) although it was far from where we lived in Wales at the time, it didn’t cost me anything, as it was paid for by the local authority. In fact, the school had a lot of money to provide each student with their own room, towels, bed linen, three healthy meals a day with snacks and some state-of-the-art technology and expertise for helping them reach their full potential. I got the sense that, the school in Uganda thrived on some basic input, but it went a long way for children who would otherwise be stuck at home, not educated and stuck in an environment where no one could communicate with them. The reporter also pointed out how, in many scenarios, children or young people returned home to be beaten and bullied, because they were deaf. It was often thought they were cursed, so they were robustly shut out of society. The situation in the west of course is much more subtle in isolating people. The West is more advanced in that: people that are deaf or hearing impaired will have good healthcare, technologies and strategies to make day-to-day life better, but they’re more likely to be isolated from their communities or taken advantage of. I had to fight tirelessly for two years to get my son into the specialist college where he now goes and thrives. The local authority and some from the local health board are what jointly funds the high costs of his tailored education. So, this moving story of the school for deaf children and young people in Uganda; the bitter-sweet story of, whether or not they were able to go onto further their education, based on an exam and fortunate tuition (which would more than likely come from generous donations) just made me cry. I thought of the children who hadn’t been found or the parents who couldn’t afford to send their kids to school in Uganda’s poor villages. I thought of how, despite all the fight, my son has actually been lucky, loved and supported. Of course we don’t know what the future holds, as he’s on the cusp of adulthood and uncharted waters, but his opportunities are far better than if he was in Uganda. So this is why, when I hear one of those wining toddlers in the shops in town: “mummy I want…” – it really gets on my nerves. You want, you want, you want, child; but if you only knew how much you already have, have, have…

Unreported World is currently available to view on http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world

The Survival of Newspapers

I was listening to PM on radio 4 the other day and interestingly, the topic was ‘can newspapers survive in a growing online market’?

I personally think yes and, the opinion of the editor and others working at the Orange County Register (Orange County coincidentally being my former hometown in California) agreed that the newspaper industry would always be relied upon and taken most seriously in the delivery of the news.

While the days of printing presses may be becoming a thing of the past, it was pointed out how: people still rely on the newspaper being delivered to their door.

Something tangible, which can be held in one’s hand – flipping through the pages, can never be forgotten or rendered obsolete and producing hardcopy newspapers would be preserved for as long as possible, was the position of one of the participants of the programme from Orange County.

Globally, I ‘strongly feel’ the hardcopy newspaper will never die. Developing countries do not have the same limitless access to the internet that we take for granted here in the West.

When I visited the Middle East for example, printing presses were still very much in operation – often providing job positions for people who are deaf, as they of decreased job opportunities.

Further to this, as we are all swept by the phenomenon of the internet, all it teaches us and exposes, how do we know we will always have it at our finger tips?

Sailing

By Dawn M. Sanders

Lighthouse in California

Have you ever tried sitting at the water’s edge on any given shoreline – watching ships of opportunity, your dreams and aspirations sail by?

I don’t have to try, it’s my life design.  I’ve been in the lighthouse from a young, young age – watching life from a distance – with the occasional visitor.

Watching how people mingle, faff, fritter and frolic with their friends.

I’m just off the shoreline a few miles, so I have enough distance between me and those who are considered ‘social material’; the lucky ones, the loved, the desired and desirable.  The ones who connect with ease – oh, let’s not forget for one second, the all-prevailing eye contact – over-rated as it is…

I watched from my vantage point, with my insight and powers of observation, those crowds gathered on the shoreline: at high school, sitting alone in the bleachers at football games, while they all were everywhere around me, with their friends, their boyfriends or girlfriends.

At lunch time, the pep squad girls would chant their cheers and pep songs – in heightened American raw raw enthusiasm.

I stood alone, at my vantage point, an outsider, with my nose pressed to the glass of the social periphery.

In pubs now, in cafes, they all eat together – it’s like high school again.

They all float in on banana or row boats – chatting and chuckling to their friends, family, kids or lovers.

Oh of course, you have the ones who come in alone, like me – the single-sailing boats, who are content to sit with their coffee or beer and read a newspaper.

You somehow get that, their okay; they have a wife, partner or girlfriend at home.

As the ocean stretches before me, I’ve grown older.

Ships of opportunity have sailed past, all lit up, like party barges, with their coloured lights glimmering and shining – lighting up the night sky.

My dreams are hatched, I nurture them and grow them with care, but as soon as they form – they die; like aborted foetuses, whimpering in the wind, still crying out, still desperate to survive and cling onto life, desperate!

Then, then the dying dreams are ships – sailing into the night, fading, with green glowing lights trailing behind them; leaving a trail of glowing green dusk into the inky black darkness, that is the night sky and open sea.

I’m left alone, with no light and only the shelter of the lighthouse, surrounded by open sea.

The ships have all drifted past: one by one, with waving arms and smug grinning faces: “I’m really, really sorry but…”

“Try ‘that one, over there’ other side of the bay.” Says a business-like voice.

Or, was it the robotically trained, disengaged voice on the phone, from the inside of a sterile, stiflingly stuffy call centre?

Whatever, whoever it was – it was, it’s gone, they’re gone – along with the barge they sail upon and my broken, dying dream left in its wake.

The dreams are fewer and further between.  I have little left to nurture them with.

My fertility is running dry, I’ve been starved ‘for so long’.

Before I was put out to sea, I walked a long, long dry desert.  It was a desert which offered few oases, yet the desolate landscape is all around – stretching further than my impaired eyes will ever see.

As I drift on this ocean, on the island that serves as my lighthouse, with its confining walls and rounded windows to view every ship sailing by: my spirit dies; with every dream, with every aspiration drowned or choked away, my spirit dies a little more.

So someday, it will fall to sleep, long, uninterrupted, unpenetrated or tormented sleep.

And I can only dream of the day, where the dawn is on the horizon and my small, damaged spirit, can vacate the island and I can finally drift  ashore, land, bury myself in soft sand and, not have to observe from afar anymore.

 

Changing Directions

Hello and a happy new year from Barriers to Bridges!

We are looking to ‘start afresh’, change directions and consider other opportunities.
Due to not being successful at securing project funding (which was essential for carrying out one-to-one advocacy at no cost to the client) – as well as losing other resources for running the business etc. I, Dawn Sanders, am looking at opportunities in community media – with a view to eventually launching a community magazine.

I will be creating a new forum which will provide space for people from other disadvantaged communities to “have their say” tell their stories, send creative writing or art work – conveying their lives.

So, we are ‘starting more or less from scratch’ and not giving up.

I will still be providing an advocacy service (where it can be funded) and we will continue to look for opportunities for talks and workshops.

However, we will be focussing on finding commited volunteers to help create a working forum and move any media opportunities forward.

Please get in touch if you can help in any way or have suggestions.

What is Advocacy?

By Dawn Sanders

Recently, it has been brought to my attention that a lot of people don’t know what advocacy is – I suspected this, but with a little nudge, thought I should make it all clear.

Advocacy just means someone else ‘advocating’ on someone’s behalf.  An advocate will provide help, support, guidance and reinforcement on someone’s behalf if, say, someone has trouble articulating themselves or is struggling “to be heard”.

A good advocate (in my opinion), would encourage and empower someone to have the confidence to take charge of their own affairs and know what they’re entitled to, but be available for whatever support is needed.

Hope that answers any questions.

Any further queries or comments though, just fire away here…