Our world against yours

Last week, I attended a volunteering event for the visually challenged at St. Xavier’s College on World Sight Day. We were a group of almost 16 people. Before entering the room, I thought we would be helping and doing some fun activities with the visually challenged people and making their day better. Little did I know, I was in for an amazing experience I would remember for life. We did not do activities along with ‘them’ to make ‘them’ feel better, instead, we were made to interact within ourselves, within the group of volunteers, to help us experience the usual, everyday life of them. All of us were blindfolded, and we used our other four senses, the senses of touch, taste, smell, and of course, hearing to solve the tasks given to us.

I will give an overview of the tasks, they were not mammoth tasks but the usual everyday easy, I should rather say supposedly easy tasks like identifying the denomination of notes and coins we were holding, recognizing the position of the person talking to us, imaging the shape by just feeling the outline of drawings and other activities that we consider mundane, like passing things around and walking, walking but without bumping into things and people.

To be honest, I was excited that we would be doing something that’s different, experiencing something that’s not usual for us, and keeping ourselves in their shoes. The activities started, we were blindfolded and made to sit together in groups. The host then asked us to hold hands with people who were sitting beside us, before that we were just getting comfortable in the new sitting areas, and we were ‘excited’, at least I was. But, the moment I held hands with the person beside me, you know what I felt, I felt safe, even if it was for a brief moment, I felt safe and it was only then I realized that I was actually frightened since the time I could not see, I was unaware of my surroundings and holding hands with someone I knew, made me feel like I am not alone, that there is someone who will not let me fall, who might take care of me, I mean there was a tiny chance that they will care. The activity ignited a chain of thought in me and I wondered why I never saw the ability to see as something to be grateful for, I know there are a lot of things that I am grateful for, someone there said that we are born with a birth lottery, having born and brought up in good families, having opportunities to be great and lead a decent life, having a choice to be independent, of course, we are born with a birth lottery, but not everyone is and these people they make their own lottery.

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