Blind Take English as Route to Independence

The class was discussing love. Toros Afarian, 51, blind and struggling with an unfamiliar tongue, had delivered a speech on the subject. Love ennobles mankind, he told his five classmates at the Braille Institute, while selfishness is the chief cause of human grief.

“Now, I want to ask them,” Afarian said: “What is love?”

“In my opinion, understanding is very important,” said Mostafa Nasserara, 29, of Los Angeles, a glaucoma victim from Iran. “Love can be to share our problems, our painful problems. When we try to solve our problems and make our situation better, we care for each other.”

Afarian, a native of Lebanon who lost his sight in a sports accident 21 years ago, leaned back and nodded in agreement.

“Love is affection,” said Farzad Tayebaty, 23, born in Iran and now living in Van Nuys. “Affection is a very important part of love.”

‘We Are Obliged’

“No, no,” Afarian said. “Love is not so much forgiving or affection. We, the Braille Institute students, are coming from many countries and we are passing time here learning many things. We are taking from the people who help and we are learning from fact what is love. We are taking some things that are coming from the source of love, and we are obliged to do something for others. We must now do our best for the others.”

Among the “things” Afarian and other blind persons gain from the Braille Institute in Hollywood are training in cane travel, cooking, Braille word processing and other skills that help them become independent. But before students may enroll in the classes, they must understand and speak English. The continuing influx of foreign speakers into Southern California has included many blind people; so many, in fact, that three years ago the Braille Institute began offering classes in English as a second language.

“Right now I have 38 students,” said Helen O’Neil, 38, of Hollywood, the institute’s ESL teacher. “About 60% of them are Hispanic. We divide them into four levels according to how much English they know.”

The discussion of love took place in the most advanced class. Beginning classes are laborious and repetitive, as O’Neil leads the students through such basics as saying their names, addresses and telephone numbers.

Inner Resources

“Even with sighted people, ESL is painstaking,” O’Neil said. “When you get no visual cues, it’s even harder. They can’t read my lips when I try to teach a consonant. I have to draw from sources within me that I didn’t know existed, in order to be gentle and be a good experience for them.”

To relieve the drudgery of grammar lessons in advanced classes, she encourages occasional discussions such as the one on love. In beginning classes, she leads students in songs and asks beginning students to walk around the room and identify the piano, tables, chairs and other objects they encounter.

“I remember talking to my mother before I took this job and she said, ‘Helen, it would be so depressing,’ but I don’t feel that way,” O’Neil said. “I know what she meant--being around the frustration and limitation of blindness. I see it in the classroom. One will get up and think he’s headed for the door, but he’s going in the opposite direction. Blindness is a loss of personal independence. But it’s amazing to see how well some of them learn to cope.”

Martin Rocha, 22, who was born in Mexico and lives in La Puente, knew no English when he was blinded in a motorcycle accident in August, 1983.

Cheerful Commuter

“At first my mother came with me (to the Braille Institute) the whole day,” he said, “and she waited outside by the fountain. Now I know how to go on the RTD.”

The trip takes an hour and a half each way and requires two transfers. Rocha makes it cheerfully. He says he’s grateful to be alive. “I was in a coma for one month,” he said, holding up a finger of one small hand, “and I stayed at the hospital five months. When I was there first, the doctor said, ‘I don’t think he is going to live for tomorrow.’ ”

Rocha smiled. “But I did.”

He is not angry at the hit-run driver who nearly killed him, he said.

O’Neil said Rocha’s acceptance of his condition is not unusual.

“Somehow many of these people are given the power to transcend their disability,” she said. “It’s quite something. Some of the Central Americans, they love their countries and they want to go back, but for political or economic reasons they can’t. They’re here and they don’t speak the language, they don’t see and they have no country. But somehow they transcend.”

Patience Pays Off

Before coming to the Braille Institute, O’Neil taught ESL to sighted adults; she was accustomed to watching her students improve fairly quickly. But in beginning classes for the blind, progress is painfully slow. She puts pieces of cloth-covered cardboard in the hands of students, who then spend most of the two-hour class struggling with concepts of “square” and “triangle,” “soft” and “hard.”

“I had to work for more patience,” O’Neil said, “and something else too. Unconsciously I’d thought that as they learned, their blindness would gradually get better. But of course it doesn’t.”

Students do not pay for instruction at the Institute, which is supported entirely by private donations. Among its projects to help foreign speakers, the center is recruiting volunteers to record audiocassettes in Spanish.

Punk Rockers

O’Neil, however, doesn’t allow languages other than English to be spoken in class. One afternoon her advanced students discussed a subject even sighted English-speakers sometimes find hard to understand--punk rockers. O’Neil had asked what they are.

“They are a special group that wears their hair short at the top or on the center,” Mostafa Nasserara said.

“Yes, but why?” O’Neil asked.

“Maybe they want to be against something,” Tayebaty said.

“Yes,” said Nasserara. “They want to break the customs. Maybe they are tired of following someone else’s way.”

Class ended a few minutes later. The students took their red-tipped canes from under the table and each slowly found their way out of the room. When one can’t see, copying another’s way is not an option.