• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10

While many people know of Helen Keller’s accomplishments and draw inspiration from her words, very few know about how a blind German woman—a woman who many call the “modern day Helen Keller”—set out alone on horseback and rode across China, bound for Tibet, on a mission to help improve the lives of those equally challenged in the oppressed region. 

In 1998, after completing her university studies in Tibetology, Sabriye Tenberken established a teaching organization called Braille Without Borders (BWB). Her mission was to train and educate the blind children of Tibet and teach them how to improve their self-esteem and become contributing members of society. The school opened with one teacher and six students.

She explained, “I wanted to do development work, to travel and have an adventurous life. And then I thought, ‘What region sounds adventurous enough to me?’ And then I found out about Tibet. I created a Braille system for the Tibetan language and decided to go to Tibet by myself, without a sighted person, to prove that blind people are capable of traveling and to convince the people that I could also run the project.”

At first everyone thought she was crazy. "They couldn't imagine I could come to Tibet," she recalled. "They said, ‘It's not possible. She's blind; who can take care of her, who can take her around?' "

Tenberken was horrified at what she found when she arrived. "I first met blind children who were 4 or 5 years old and looked like infants,” she said. “They were tied to the bed and hadn't learned to walk because their parents hadn't taught them. They couldn’t believe that I was blind myself and I was looking for children, because blind children had no value at all in society."