80-20 stories to truths

Category: Blog

  • Why would I rather be second in competitions?

    I was visiting Hong Kong some time ago, it feels like every time I visit, there’d be some new mega train stations – while they make travelling very convenient, I often have to ask for directions. 

    On this occasion, as soon as I stepped off the train, some random people came up to me to ask me if I was going running, I said no and ran away. 

    I discovered some time later that some volunteers were meeting some blind people to go running together from that station – blind people need to be guided when going for a run. I also discovered that in Hong Kong, there are very well-organised volunteer groups to help blind people do all kinds of activities – hiking, running, biking holidays – I heard that it is even possible to ask a volunteer to help a blind couple go on a date.

    From what I can gather, this program of matching volunteers with visually impaired people has made it possible for people who are otherwise not active to become active, which is important, as the barrier for disabled people to participate in “normal” leisure activities is very high. Yet there is a flip side – there’s an important difference between support to integrate vs support to isolate – let me explain.

    Firstly, for all the activities the volunteering program supports, all of the participants are visually impaired, this heavily restricts the circle of friends visually impaired people can have, a lot of them end up living in a visually impaired bubble.

    Secondly, over time, it creates an assumption in the blind people’s mind that they cannot step out to do something, unless they are supported by a volunteer or some organisation. Case in point, a blind university graduate in Hong Kong asked me for advice on what they needed to do to get on to an IT career path. I told them that the reality is, that if there are 1000 graduates like you who want to have a career in IT, all of you having done the same degree, had the same grade, you’d be the last an employer picked because of your disability – this isn’t a pessimism, this is the blunt truth. So you’d always have to do a bit more than everyone else, build and make something tangible – a website, an AI bot, a web app, whatever it is so people can see what you can do.

    “Can I do that? Did you learn any of this yourself, and are the software and courses for me to learn accessible to blind people?” was my new friend’s response. 

    “If you stop just because I or someone else says you won’t be able to do it, either you don’t want it enough or you really need to change your assumptions.” I told him.

    There might be cases where support of any kind is needed, even if it means a little isolation, people need their confidence to be built up. As far as possible however, support to integrate should be aimed for, from my own experience, it takes a few things to succeed:

    1. Sighted people who are in a position to support ought to give blind people a chance, DO NOT default to “when I do XYZ I use my eyes, so a blind person surely cannot do XYZ”
    2. The blind person also has to be willing to try and explore
    3. the blind person has to accept their disability, there could well be compromise, disadvantages despite the best integration.

    Many of you know that I play Backgammon; Recently I started learning Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. I have been playing in Backgammon tournaments with sighted people around the world for well over 10 years, I have just signed up to my first Jiu-jitsu competition. In both cases, at the beginning of me joining these communities, the people had no experience in working with / teaching blind people, yet they are incredibly supportive, they just assumed that it’d work – now when I go for my BJJ classes, the coaches would use me as the demo which is how I learn; as for the competitions, I am very aware of the disadvantages I have. my sighted competitors wouldn’t go easy on me just because I’m blind – they also want to win, my acceptance of my disadvantages is almost the same as someone who has to accept that they are tall, short, slow at mental arithmetic – I just have to work on other strengths to compensate, and I tell you, I’m not modest, I compensate well. 

    For sure, in terms of competition, someone who is equal to me in everything except that they can see would certainly beat me, but I’d rather be second in an integrated competition than being first in a bubble. 

    In the non-competitive context, the benefits of integration over isolation are immense, just the social benefits and general exposure to the world will help a lot of blind people.

  • If you can’t change your situation, change your attitude

    It’s disability awareness month, so I want to write something about it, something that I have not come across before regarding disability, hoping that I can offer you a different perspective.

    Disabilities such as blindness is so physically visible that as soon as a normal person comes across a blind person, all they can see is blindness, everything the blind person does is seen through the blindness lens, to the extent that all a blind person has to do is to walk down some stairs without holding on to the hand rail, and suddenly he / she is an inspiration – honestly not holding on to the handrail is just showing off, they would have been an inspiration regardless.

    I don’t find daily life activities challenging, I travel on my own, I go swimming on my own, I can go play in Backgammon tournaments anywhere – my main hobby – on my own, I even went to play craps in Vegas myself. What I have struggled with, and still do sometimes, is the limitation and exclusion placed on me because I cannot see.

    Take Backgammon and Vegas for example. I am very reasonable at Backgammon, before Covid I was consistently playing in professional tournaments and at least broke even most years- the only blind person who can do it. Yet I have never read a Backgammon book, I cannot watch how good players play, I have to come up with my own way to learn. Could I have been an even better player, given everything being equal, if I had access to books? Almost certainly, but this is a limitation I have to accept, and you can imagine, this is just one of thousands of examples. 

    As for Vegas, so much of it depends on visuals, most of the social activities depend on being able to see, I cannot do a lot of things I want to to do, I do not have the freedom to do a lot of things I should not do, in or out of Vegas I simply do not have the freedom to choose what to participate in – can’t play tennis with friends, can’t go for a walk to explore on my own, you name it. Would I be a frequent silent disco goer were I able to see? Maybe, I don’t have a choice.

    It’s very easy for anyone to tell me that even with the limitations, I have gotten very far already, or just don’t think about the what-ifs since it cannot be changed. Indeed, over the years, I have become much better at accepting these immutable limitations and exclusions, “if you can’t change the situation, change your attitude.” Still, in many ways, this is a much harder part of disability to deal with than overcoming physical barriers. I could and I did spend a lot of time in university sitting in front of a scanner to scan books from library in order to read, because I had no other way to access reading materials, but there isn’t a way to overcome the fact and thought that I could have learnt much more had I been able to read normally.

    What’s the point of this post? Perhaps you can pass it on to someone who is disabled and help them change their attitude, perhaps you’d even recognise that in fact, what I am discussing is not specific to disability – everyone would love to be able to sit in front of a piano and play like Daniel BarenBoim and sing like … whoever, but that’s everyone’s limitation, so everyone has to learn to change attitude, just that a disabled person has to learn to change a lot more.

    And perhaps, you’re in a position to help contribute to making and building whatever you’re making and building more inclusive. Take your pick, I’m happy if you took any of these points from this post. 

    Thanks for reading.