Fit for post Corona
My call got her out of a rehearsal for a reality dance show, a telecast competition which will be on TV soon. In this show, famous dancers from across Nepal participate with a dance-partner. They compete in front of a critical television audience who decide which couple advances to the next level and who must leave.
“And who is your dancing partner?” I want to know. She laughs mischievously: “Oho, my partner is my white cane!”
Sristi KC, a kanthari graduate from 2012, is a dancer, a public speaker, an actress, an adventurer, a motivator, an initiator and oh yes, I almost forgot, Sristi is completely blind like me.
Long ago, in 2011, Sristi, Paul and I had our first blind-date in one of our favorite bakeries in Thamel, Kathmandu.
We were on our way from Tibet to Kerala, and as always after a few months living on Tsampa, noodle soup and butter tea only, we were starving for hearty food, it had to be at least a rich English breakfast! We had been enduring the tempting smell of bacon and fried tomatoes for a while till Sristi arrived with her friend. But of course, we didn’t want to start without her.
“Good morning sir! good morning madam!” came a somewhat hesitant voice from her direction. Her friend held her on the shoulder, directing her towards our table. Sristi took tiny and somewhat uncertain steps. There was no white cane to be seen anywhere.
“Do you want to eat something?”, we asked, to get going.
“No thank you,” she replied hesitantly.
Although, we knew the game quite well from Tibet – say “no” three times and then a “yes!” – we were so impatient that we decided to take her “no” for what it was. And since also the friend shook her head, we ordered only for ourselves.
Later, the three of us remembered this scene of our first get together. Sristi made fun of the situation. “Oh, I was so hungry that morning! I just thought, how rude that these guys didn’t even ask further!”
Sristi of today cannot really be compared with the young woman we met back then.
She now knows exactly what she wants and in the meantime, she’s had many chances to say a real “no!” as well as a clear “yes!”.
But let’s go back a little in her history:
Sristi was 16 years old when she literally lost the ground under her feet. During a dance performance, she stepped into the void and fell from the stage.
Only then she realized that she had lost her eyesight completely.
Sighted persons have a hard time to understand this. “How can you not know that you don’t see anymore? Isn’t it dark?”
But having experienced becoming blind at an almost similar age as Sristi, I know exactly how slowly the transition from vision to vague perception and then to total blindness can be.
The always active visual cortex simply does not notice what is happening. If the visual images are not generated through the optic nerve, why not just get them from somewhere else?
The idea that blindness equals darkness, is simply “naivety of the sighted”. Blindness is not just “not perceiving”, it is a different way of imagining.
Sristi would agree with me. “I see, even if I don’t see anything.”, she says over and over again. And I can almost hear what the skeptical listeners must think: “Oh, what a brave young girl! She is trying so hard to make the best of her fate!”
But they just don’t know Sristi!
This woman is neither forcefully positive nor can one call her “brave” as you might call a little child “brave” that tries hard not to cry after getting hurt. To be brave you need pain or fear. And Sristi, as we got to know her over the years, is rather fearless.
She just tackles life from a completely different angle. Yes, at first, she believed the dance teachers who advised her not to continue dancing. and after the many ophthalmologists and miracle healers could no longer help her, she began to study again. Instead of reading, she never had the opportunity to acquire the skills of reading and writing in Braille – which she regrets – she learned everything by heart and graduated with flying colours.
And then she came to the kanthari Institute, and back then, still in tiny steps. The steps became jumps and finally, the founded “Blind Rocks”, an initiative that wants to bring blind people across the world to the dance floor and in the spotlight on a stage. http://www.blindrocks.org/
“Blind Rocks” not only trains the blind in dance, it offers courses in fashion and organizes adventure trips with rafts through the wild rivers of Nepal and later – why not – paragliding?
In the meantime, she continued her dance studies in Norway, Hungary and England. And there again she was met with the same skepticism: “How can a blind person learn to dance?” “why don’t you try singing?”
“No way!” Sristi replies, and this “no!” today comes from a powerful personality who traveled the world and who never gives up when it comes to changing mindsets about blindness.
Sristi also takes every opportunity to bring the blind themselves out of their lethargy into society. Even during times of Corona.
As many others, she creatively uses online-platforms to continue to confront the sighted with her sometimes quite provocative ideas.
In 10 different high schools, she organized online blind dates. Sighted students, who never had the chance to think about lacking one sense, through games and challenging tasks, experience blindness not as a deficit, but as a possibility to solve problems. And this is an ability that we will need during and after the pandemic as well as other crises.
Additionally, she works with Nepalese blind persons who are somewhere out there, locked down in isolation, having no way to exercise.
“Fit for Post Corona,” she calls her virtual fitness studio for the blind. It is a video course, with a coach describing all the moves he makes.
“How does this work?” I ask in disbelief, because there are only few people who can verbalize complex movements.
“no problem.” and Sristi now imitates her trainer: “Imagine a chair, and now sit down, but just don’t make yourself too comfortable. Get up, and sit down again, get up, sit down. …”
Through video, the blind trainees are watched by volunteers and, if they misunderstand something, or imagine the chair too well, they intervene, preventing potential painful surprises.
But today, she has to go on stage herself. The dance competition starts in exactly two weeks. Nepal will sit in front of the TV and play jury. We are all familiar with the format from the many talent shows and I am curious whether she is a bit nervous?
“Of course not! I know my partner very well, there won’t be any surprises!”