A blinding success

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Nervous about letting the kids go on a school trip? Forget it – and forget health and safety. Put your worries in perspective by watching six blind Tibetan children trying to climb the 23,000-ft Lhakpa Ri on north side of Mt Everest.

I spent most of Blindsight blinking my teary eyes at the heart-rending emotions of handicapped children attempting the impossible, worrying that the experienced adults – some of them also blind – were pushing them dangerously hard, and muttering “Unbelievable”. Inbetween, I was vowing to be as courageously helpful to others as blind educator Sabriye Tenberken, founder of the Braille Without Borders school in Lhasa, and Erik Weihenmayer, the blind mountaineer who reached the summit of Everest in 2001 and who had the idea for the film.

“Erik told me climbing mountains gave him confidence as a teenager”, recalls producer Sybil Robson, “and he wanted to share that experience with these blind Tibetan kids.

“He asked me if thought taking six blind Tibetan teenagers up a 23,000-foot mountain in the Himalayas sounded like a movie.” She thought it did, and she was right: it’s a wonderful film. No wonder it has won “Audience award for best film” at three film festivals.

It is absorbing not only because of the adventure itself, and the drama of wondering how each child will cope, but also because the film takes time to look at the children’s backgrounds.

Though one of the young climbers, 15-year-old Tenzin, was accepted in his home village and given responsibility for yak herding, blind Tibetan children often start life with the cards stacked against them: many Tibetans believe blind children are possessed by demons or paying for sins in earlier lives. Society, villages and even parents are liable to reject, and sometimes abuse, them. (“Morons. You deserve to eat your father’s corpse,” says a passer-by. “The cleverest child has gone to waste”, says a mother confronted by the onset of a son’s blindness.)

Gyenshen, 17, for example, was kept in a dark room in his family’s home for three years before being found and taken to the school in Lhasa. Tashi, 19, was sold at the age of ten to a Chinese couple who he says tortured him when he didn’t earn enough through begging; he ran away and had to fight off other street kids who beat him and stole his money.

“Blind people in Tibet are really lacking in resources, support, understanding, medical care and expectations,” says director Lucy Walker.

Another fascinating aspect of the story and the film is the difference in approach between the experienced and relentlessly optimistic mountaineers brought in to mentor the children – whose aim is to get to the top of the mountain – and Tenberken, who sees the venture as about friendship and togetherness and “the challenge of getting the children to understand they are equal human beings.” The clash comes to a head when a decision is made, 1500 feet from the peak, to send back three kids suffering badly from altitude sickness. The question then is: do the others continue or follow them down in solidarity?

* Next screening: TV, Sunday 7 June.

* Braille Without Borders