Blind Stories E-Book

Marcos Lima

• Herausgeber: Oficina Raquel
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 160

Beschreibung

A collection of the best chronicles published in the Histórias de cego project, initially a blog and later a YouTube channel, where, in addition to telling a little about his experience in such a visual society, Marcos Lima shows us the world through his eyes. With his senses as sharp as his sense of humor, he tells how he spent a day in a wheelchair, fulfilled a childhood dream when he explored the island of Malta and how the sport changed his life.

Leseprobe

Title page

© Marcos Lima, 2020 © Oficina Raquel, 2020

PUBLISHING Raquel Menezes Jorge Marques

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Yasmim Cardoso

COVER Marcel Lopes

GRAPHIC DESIGN AND DIAGRAMATION Julio Baptista [email protected]

REVIEW Luis Maffei

EBOOK PRODUCTION S2 Books

Dados internacionais de catalogação na publicação (CIP)

Lima, Marcos.

L732h

Blind Stories / Marcos Lima. – Rio de Janeiro : Oficina Raquel, 2020.

156 p. ; 18 cm.ISBN 978-65-86280-55-5

1. Brazilian chronicles I. Title.

CDD B869.8 CDU 821.134.3(81)-32

www.oficinaraquel.com [email protected] facebook.com/Editora-Oficina-Raquel

A special thanks to these people who supported our project.

Adriana Barbedo

Adriana Silva Barbosa

Aldomir Freire Costa

Alessandra Gualberto dos Santos

Alexandre Leonato Neto

Aline Savieto

Aluisio Soares Peixoto

Ana Besserman

Ana Lidia Barbosa Lima

Ana Lúcia Vargas Arigony

Ana Maria Henriques

Ana Maria Tardin Mury

Andre Luiz de Souza Portugal

Angela Nobrega Fonti

Angelica Sales de Souza

Aninha Lima

Anna Stéphany Silva Soares

Beatrice Lima

Beatriz Assunção

Bianca de Berenguer Fernandes

Bianca do Espírito Santo Ferreira

Bruna Bueno

Bruna Massarelli

Bruna Nayara Moreira Lima

Bruna Traversaro

Bruno Viécili

Camila Carneiro

Carla Beraldo

Carlos Haddad

Carol Simm

Carol Sims

Carolina Ghorayeb

Caroline Cardoso Souza

Cesar Lopes Aguiar

Cintya Floriani

Claudia Mauricio

Cleiton de Sousa Moura

Cristiani Mury Saad

Cristiani Mury Saad

CyberTigra

Dani Arruda

Daniela Roechow

Daniele Martins de Almeida Borçato

Danilo Pereira Franco de Souza

Dayanne Clemente Gonçalves dos Santos

Dina Pereira de Melo

Eduardo Butter Scofano

Erika Pires Vieira

Evelina Aparecida de Oliveira

Ewerton Franco de Camargo

Fabio Betti Salgado

Felipe dos Santos Pereira da Silva

Felipe Gavino Carneiro Costa

Felipe Tiso

Fernanda Camargo

Fernando Alves Pinto Junior

Fernando Antônio Montenegro Damasceno

Fernando Eduardo da Silva

Fernando Pelin

Flavia Silveira de Azevedo

Flávia Weiner Parente Eizirik

Gabriel Senna

Gabriela Nóra

Georgia Malva da Silva Lima

Guilherme Castro

Gustavo Nascimento

Helder Filho

Henrique Santos

Histórias de Ter.a.pia

Ibraima Dafonte Tavares

Jacqueline Belotti

Jana Alves Dias

Jéssica Magalhães

Jessie Vic

Joanne Bruno Viana

João Pedro de Oliveira Borsani

Joaquim Monteiro

Jocemar Junior

Jorge Felipe

Juan Jose Salgado Saavedra

Juliana Pereira de Faria

Juliane Aline Feltrin Ferreira

June Alves de Arruda

Karen Matesco Nunes V. Lins

Karina Trotta

Kennya Pimentel Novais de Mendonça Costa

Lara Gondim Toledo

Larissa Maria Vitor Dourado

Larissa Pereira Gonçalves

Lêda Maria Gomes

Leo Cagnani

Leonardo Coelho de Velasco

Leticia Alves

Leticia Fonti

Letícia Riguetto Nunes

Lidiane Manthay Leal

Livia Bragato Sales

Luciana Harada

Luciane Moutinho

Mailê Novôa

Manu Ilgenfritz

Manuela Silveira

Márcia Alves Esteves Lima

Marcia Maurício

Marcilio Ribeiro de Sant’Ana

Marcio Minuzzi Passos

Maria Cecília Moutinho

Maria Danielle Oliveira Silva

Maria Flor Abrantes Brazil

Maria Lucia Mury

Mariana de Lamare

Mariana Esteves

Mariana Kohnert Medeiros

Mariana Meira

Mariana Souza

Mariana Verdun

Mariana Vieira de Mello

Mariele Pantaleao

Marilia Mesquita Guedes Pereira

Marília Morais

Marina Françoso

Maxwell Correia de Araujo

Melissa Haberkamp

Milkluv Delfim

Monique Mury Saad Onuki

Nádia de Oliveira Ribas

Nadia Garcia

Neylor Toscan

Nilza Rodrigues Verdan de Aquino

Nina Attias

Pablo Roxo

Patricia Mury Saad

Patricia Regina Lopes Moreira

Patricia Vasconcellos

Paula Barcelos Pimentel

Paula de Campos Monteiro

Paula de Faria Fernandes Martins

Paula Gisele Gomes Rassia

Perivaldo dos Santos Carvalho

Priscila Silveira Ferreira

Rafael Roger Ferreira do Nascimento

Rafaela Debastiani

Regiane Bochichi

Regina Antunes

Renata Sanches Barbosa

Renato Frosch

Ricardo Edson Lima

Roberta Pope

Rodolfo Freire de Almeida

Rodrigo Pontes de Lima

Samara de Figueiredo Gonçalves

Sandra Mara Kawasaki

Sheila Maria Sirydakis

Sônia Rooke Las Casas

Tainara Schneider

Tamara Toledo

Teresa J C D Amaral

Thais Castro

Thaise Gomes

Thalita Bessa Pires

Thalita Gelenske Cunha

Thalita Oliveira

Thiago Carvalho Bayerlein

Thiago Chacon

Usiel Haddad

Valéria Carvalho Santos

Vanderson Berbat

Vanessa Sales

Vanessa Viana

Vera Alice da Silva Peres

Veronica Santana da Fonseca Baptista

Vinicius Fernandes dos Santos

Vitor

Vitória Aline Viana

Vivi Vresk

Vivian Alt Vieira

Wagner Crivelini

Wellington Ismail

Yanna Cunha

Introduction

Ican remember it like it was today. Or rather, as if it were in 2010: me and my childhood friend, Anderson, talking about how the blind identify things as we walk along rio’s tumultuous sidewalks. “I know it’s a pharmacy by the smell”, he said. And then came the will: Why not tell all this to the world?

The literary adventure called Stories of theBlind , which began in2010, was only six months long. It was, however, a very interesting period, in which the space, then a column on the website of the NGO Urece Sport and Culture (of which I was one of the founders), gained audience and a repercussion that even I myself imagined. Even matter on TV Brazil at the time we turned. However, for several reasons that transcend my disability, I have no longer been able to update the column as I would like. So when our old server went off the air, I lost all the stories published and especially the comments and participations of readers, the truth is that the column had already died long ago.

But there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel... even for those who are blind almost by birth, like me. Throughout that time without the Blind Stories, I knew that one day the project would come back (it had to come back), and the time came to relaunch it. The format chosen was slightly different: a blog.

That’s how, already with its own address and a lot of support from many people, between 2013 and 2017 the Stories of the blind gained personality and more than 80 chronicles, besides having expanded to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. The number of lectures, training and consultancies multiplied, and with them I could pay my electricity bills (yes, blind people also pay electricity bills). As I was out of work since my contract with Rio 2016 ended, I depended a lot on the blog for companies to know me and hire me.

Until, in June 2017, another little problem on the server culminated in the loss of all the content of the blog. The Blind Stories is not a cat, but has already spent two of their lives. It was sad to lose everything for the second time: comments, posts, links, videos... It was a great sadness; at the time I needed it most, there was no longer blog. I’m back to square one.

But life goes on and even without tactile flooring, we move on. The texts themselves were saved and are now re-released in book format, honoring many readers who did not tire of asking for a printed edition in the comments of the late blog. And that’s how this new phase of Blind Stories begins..

The goal of Stories of the Blind is to bring readers closer to the daily lives of visually impaired people. Without being cranky, I want to give a lower weight to the disability, bringing the lesser known aspects of the life of a person who has to turn around without seeing in such a visual world. Difficulties and solutions, overcoming obstacles, technology, prejudices and, above all, many stories.

The Stories of the blind also exists on social networks, with the youtube channel that has 180, 000 subscribers and more than 4.4 million views, as well as profiles on Facebook and Instagram.

Access:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/historiasdecego

Instagram: @historiasdecego

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/historiasdecego

Summary

Capa

Title page

Credits

Dedication

Introduction

Include or not include, Here’s the question

Blind by ball

We do not see (the) obstacles

Between four doors

Our September 7th of each day

How the blind see the world

Family! Family!

Blind settings have been updated

On the left, the abyss

The photographic albums of the blind

Friendly fire

Why don’t we see obstacles

In search of the blind Earl of Luxembourg

The cure

Emozzjoni, the victory of defeat

I don’t want the vision, I want the visualization

The power of Paralympic sport

The day I walked on two wheels

Exchange of look

Through the front door

After all the final

Neither white nor blue... was really black!

The ten best things about being blind

Include or not include, Here’s the question

Mpeople have asked me what I think of the idea of regular schools serving people with disabilities, restricting the role of special schools.

For me it is difficult to speak of all kinds of disability, so I will not get into the merits of the issue in a more comprehensive way. As our chat here is visual impairment, I will give my opinion on the subject with regard to this particular segment. I make it clear that I am not a pedagogue, I have never studied this issue through the bias of educator theories; I want to simply share some thoughts all fruits of my experience as a visually impaired person.

First of all, it is worth explaining my story, briefly. I was born with congenital glaucoma, detected when I was a few months old. Despite all the effort of my family and the sixteen surgeries performed, at the age of 6 I completely lost my sight. At this time, He was already studying at the Benjamin Constant Institute, a special school focused on teaching blind and low-vision students. I stayed there until I was 16, when I was in eighth grade. Then, I tendered for the Pedro II College, where I studied the three years of high school (or high school), until, passing the journalism entrance exam, I entered the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

All this to say that I am a great enthusiast and, more than that, a special school product. For me, she was instrumental in my growth as a person and as a professional. Living with friends who had visual impairment taught me a lot. If they could tie the sneakers alone, So could I; if they, residents including municipalities of baixada Fluminense, could return home alone, I, who lived less than a kilometer from the institution, could also; if they could play ball, why couldn’t I either? And that’s how, even though they didn’t know it, my friends, colleagues and acquaintances taught me a lot. There I was not the blind, but just another blind man, of whom no one would pass his hand on his head because of the disability, since there were hundreds of others with the same characteristics.

I keep thinking that if I had, since I was a child, had studied at an ordinary school, where I would be the only visually impaired student, I would have missed the chance to develop.

After all, among so many children who see, I would always be the “blind”. And without examples in which to mirror myself, perhaps today I was a much more limited person.

If later in my life I could live with psychics.... I don’t mean the Dináh Mothers; psychic, in our slang, means person who sees. I said that if I was able to live with psychics without me being just the “blind” of the group, it was because, while I was in special school, I had the bases and confidence necessary to position myself in society, with my defects and qualities, with my virtues and deficiencies that unfortunately go far beyond the visual.

If it wasn’t for this coexistence, I wouldn’t have learned to play football (and what would my life be like without a rattle ball?) and, without joining the sport, I wouldn’t have played so many championships and traveled three times out of Brazil because of them... Exaggeration? Think then: how could I play football on equal terms if I were the only blind man within a three-mile radius? Without knowing other blind people, how could I know that 5 football teams were formed and that national and international championships were played?

And if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have seen and lived how much sport changes people’s lives and how much more we can do for it. And if it wasn’t for all that, today Urece certainly wouldn’t exist, even though Anderson, Gabriel, Filippe and so many others wouldn’t have been part of my history and urece history.

If it were not for the daily coexistence with my friends with visual impairment, I would not have learned that for everything one can fix and that the greatest deficiency is the ability to self-limit and the greatest impediment, far from being those eyes that look and do not see, is the lack of accessibility. I wouldn’t have learned that you can put a ball in a plastic bag and play football guided by the noise it produces in contact with the floor or, in the absence of a real spherical, you never would have thought that a plastic bottle would be enough to have any pebbles to ensure the fun of an entire afternoon.

If it wasn’t for living with my blind and visually impaired friends, I probably would have limited myself to doing what people thought a blind person could do.

“I don’t walk alone because I’m blind, others walk because they see.” “I can’t get good grades because I can’t see and then it’s hard for me to learn math; others see and then they go well.” Not to mention the whole pedagogical structure I had at the Benjamin Constant Institute, with teachers prepared to teach people with my disability, with much smaller classes that allowed teachers to make an almost personalized service at many times, with books and handouts in Braille, with a library with hundreds of titles in Braille or audio... That is, although we’re just on a guessing exercise, I probably wouldn’t be what I am today.

But then it’s time to fly! And that moment came for me, just at the end of the first grade. OK, I had already lived and grown up with my friends who also have visual impairment, had already seized the limits and especially the potentialities of my disability, so that the time had come to break the links with the little world made for me and insert myself in real life. No, the world is not made up of colleagues and teachers who have the same disability as you, braille books, adapted materials... On the contrary, this is just a small exception. The real world is built by a massive wall of prejudice, injustice, lack of accessibility, exclusion, but it’s no use hiding in a dark room and waiting for no one to find you, because it’s in this dog world that you live in. So you have to find your place in it, as much as it seems more comfortable to always stay attached to the nursery school where everything is done to meet your needs.

And, when I was 16, entering a regular school, surrounded by classmates who not only had no disabilities, but had never seen a blind man in life (who will say two, because it was me and my friend Filippe, shrunk on the first day of school, wondering what the animal was going to give), I began to learn that there is much more in the world and in myself.

I did not later discover in practice that I am much more than a blind man, who could get out in the hand with my friends just for fun and win or lose like any other ... I learned that as difficult as mathematics or physics was, one could always take a little look to understand a graph, because if I had been able to do it before when my classmates were visually impaired, why couldn’t I now too? I learned that there are socially accepted things and that others are not and that, unlike you, other people see and that little finger on the nose would not go unnoticed. And so those years were fundamental to my growth as a person and as a professional.

“Whoa, I’ve read this before, “you must be thinking. And you’ve read it at the beginning of the text, referring exactly to the special school. And that sums up well what I think about it: there’s time for everything. Special school is fundamental for you to grow up with other people who have the same disability and learn, with them, to demand yourself as much as possible to become as independent and autonomous as possible without using disability as a shield or excuse because you are exactly like your colleagues. And there is also the time to enter the real world, when you will not always have compassion or understanding with you or your disability, because, in fact, it is in this world that we live, with its injustices and idiosyncrasies, but it is only possible to change it by being within it.

This is just an account of my experiences.

I am not saying here that blind people who have studied their whole lives in regular schools cannot be great professionals and there are undoubtedly those who are much more advanced and developed than me. What I mean by this account is that certainly having lived with blind colleagues and with colleagues without disabilities was too important for my training as a person, a shortcut that i only realize of the importance now that I look back (and i don’t see anything).

Blind by ball

Will you take it?

Go, go, go, go, go, go

Do you really take it?

Go, go, go, go, go, go

“So there goes...

Grites like this, with these exact words, echoed throughout my childhood in the inner courtyard of the Benjamin Constant Institute, a school for blind and visually impaired students in which I studied throughout first grade. Located in one of the corners of the wide area, the goal by goal was our field of naked. And I hope it’s still in this generation of virtual games.

The long and narrow space, tight between a wall with windows and a lawn, with the 4 side pilasters being used as a crossbar and as a demarcation for the penalties of the game, the goal on goal was one of the pulsaing centers of blind children who, like me, discovered that despite everything, it was possible to play football. Recently, I was discussing the size of our makeshift camp with my friend Anderson, and we were surprised to find that it was no more than 10 or 15 meters long (and it seemed like a world when we were little!).

Before I knew the ball or even dreamed that there was a sport called football for the blind, my player’s longings were in that sleathing runner.