A Friendly Visit

Today I met a friend, after a gap of almost six months. We live a stone’s throw away from each other’s house, so it’s kind of funny that we don’t get together more often. But when we do, we just resume chatting as if we never left off!

I came to know her through a friend of a friend. I heard that she had started an NGO for people with disabilities –primary visually impaired, and was looking for volunteers.

When we met at a coffee shop for the first time, we really hit it off. The similarities between us were quite eerie. We both had come back to India for good from the US around the same time, we both were living in the same area, and we were both going to shift to our own houses around the same time, and to the same area again! Our thoughts, our sentiments, our values….we could almost complete each other’s sentences. Sometimes, I felt I was looking at a new, improved version of myself!

For me, the volunteering opportunity was as perfect as it could get. For some reason, I had always felt a special affinity to the visually impaired. I had always wanted to get involved in some sort of voluntary work. The kind of work she outlined fitted in perfectly with my skills and my interests – it was teaching computer basics to the visually impaired – I loved teaching and computers were anyway my field of work.

It all fell into place beautifully – just like so many other things in my life.

She began lending me teach-the-teacher kind of material, and I read up a lot on the world of the visually impaired, and every time, it struck me forcefully as to how much we rely on our vision to get by in our lives. Teaching was not straight-forward – you couldn’t just say point and click on this – you had to spend a great deal of time painting a picture for the students, before they could actually start working. There were tools, techniques, tips and tricks to be mastered. You had to exercise your creativity in giving examples from the real world which they could map onto easily. Exercises had to be devised which would test out what all they learnt, simulating a real-world environment, since the main emphasis was on practical training.

Added to this, it was also a very mixed class – few with complete loss of vision, few with low vision, few with some computer awareness, few who didn’t know English to begin with. Many commuted from quite far off, and sometimes simply didn’t show up, which made it harder to keep the class in sync. Fitting the classes into my schedule and preparing for them took up a decent chunk of time. There were the fast learners you had to devise more challenging exercises for, and the slow learners who needed simpler, repetitive exercises. It was an intense learning journey for me – communicating intelligently with the students and moving the class along at a sensible pace, yet always having to be prepared for the unexpected.

Needless to say, I loved every minute of it, and the thrill of seeing them actually accomplishing simple tasks effortlessly was simply priceless and hugely satisfying!

After D. came along however, I had to prune down my activities, and one of the casualities, unfortunately, was my volunteering. I still remained in touch sporadically with my friend, and it was simply amazing that we would be going through almost exactly similar experiences whenever we spoke. In fact, it almost always happened that she would be thinking of calling me if I called her, and vice versa.

When I went back today, I met one of my students who now works at the NGO. She was a shy and diffident person when I was teaching her – now, apparently, she has developed a voracious appetite for learning, and devours anything within her reach! It was fun to be back there again, and I’m just waiting for D. to go to pre-school so that I can resume teaching again.

I’ll be posting more about my friend and her NGO sometime in the near future – so watch this space.