There is a pivotal moment from which one starts to look at oneself and life differently. Sabriye Tenberken, a visually-challenged person and the Co-Founder of Kanthari (an institute to groom social entrepreneurs), calls this a “pinching point”. Her own pinching point? She says she had several. One of the earliest was when at the School for the Blind in Marburg, Germany, she told her teachers that she wanted to try out single whitewater kayaking (a sport that involves paddling in moving water). The teachers did not hesitate to say yes. She was encouraged by the trust her teachers placed in her.
Sabriye lost her eyesight when she was 12, but it is no disability, she says. “It can be a disability, say if I were to be a bus driver. But not otherwise. Normal people cannot be a sumo wrestler. So do we say they have a disability in becoming sumo wrestlers?,” she asks raising a pertinent point.
She had another pinching point while studying Sociology and Tibetology at Bonn University, Germany. She was the Student President and in a meeting when the professors unitedly backed one view, she had another opinion. When she voiced her idea, she heard a professor whisper, “First she is blind, then she has to open her mouth.” Sabriye says, “It was both saddening and uplifting at the same time. I realised then that my role in life is to be an obstacle. That I have the right to say what I felt like.”
While she was at Bonn, she travelled to Tibet and decided that’s where her mission was. She had to drop out of college, to settle down in a place where most people held the belief that the visually-challenged brought ill luck. For the blind children, who were considered as outcasts, she wanted to set up a school. She wanted to empower them. She shared the dream with her friend Paul Kronenberg, an engineer.
The school they set up in Lhasa, Tibet, named the Centre for the Blind, is today run by its first-generation students. Sabriye says that 85 per cent of the graduates from her school are self-employed. Says the 2013 INK Fellow, “Why were they successful when the odds were against them? It is because they have nothing to lose. They had freedom as they had no hold in the society. They grew up into highly reliable people who could challenge the status quo. They became a Kanthari.” Kanthari in Malayalam is the name of a variety of chilli. Kanthari, the residential programme Sabriye and Paul run in Thiruvananthapuram, is meant to mentor and shape social entrepreneurs and change makers. “The red chilli looks small and harmless, until you bite into it. Then you realise that it is spicy, but still good for health for its vitamins. At the programme, if a participant is tagged red kanthari, it means they are activists. Then there are the green kantharis, who are initiators. The yellow kantharis are inventors. The orange ones have a business mind and can be social entrepreneurs. Then there are the purple ones. Artists and writers who make a difference belong to this group,” says Sabriye.
She believes that a person who has gone through a problem and overcome it can solve others’ woes. Most of the participants have been through challenging life situations. Some of them are visually-challenged. Perhaps why, if you need to ask for directions to Kanthari, you need to ask for a school for the visually-challenged at the Vellayani Junction. “My vision is that we move away from Kanthari, and it should be run by the graduating students,” says Sabriye.
— archa1982@gmail.com