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New Media Resources Modernize Tajik School for the Blind

By Nicholas Detsch

While many schools in Tajikistan lack the necessary support and resources to provide high quality education, the difficulties that boarding schools for the visually impaired face are even more daunting. The availability of educational materials in audio and Braille formats often is very limited or virtually non-existent in these schools, thus depriving the schoolchildren of additional opportunities for learning and personal growth.

Recognizing the crucial need within her community for improved access to educational materials by children with visual impairments, Nisso Rahmonova-Stanley, a 2004 alumna of the Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program, a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State, met with the founder and director of a local boarding school in Dushanbe to learn how she could make a difference. The school, one of the first to be established in Dushanbe for the visually impaired, provides treatment and educational services to 65 children ranging in age from 7 to15 years.

Based upon her assessments at the school, Rahmonova, who holds a master’s in education from California State University - Chico, developed a project aimed at establishing a resource center within the boarding school that would provide the teachers, schoolchildren and their parents, with access to audiobooks, CDs, and educational and recreational materials printed in Braille. The overarching goal of the resource center was to provide the schoolchildren with the resources needed for educational advancement and development and to revitalize their interest in studying and learning.

Through an Alumni Small Grant, a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State (ECA) and administered by IREX, and generous contributions from the Russian publishing house for the blind “Logos,” Tajik citizens, and the Tajik Embassy in Russia, Rahmonova was able to implement her project and realize her goals.

Rahmonova used her small grant funds to purchase Braille books and educational games for the new resource center, adding to the library of books that had been donated by Logos to help her cause. She also worked closely with personal acquaintances to access the world’s widest selections of recorded Tajik fairytales so that the children could listen to the recordings in the evenings before bedtime. With help from local experts and donated funds, Rahmonova was able to refurbish the centralized intercom system, thus allowing the children to hear the recorded fairytales throughout the school.

At the completion of her project, the resource center was unveiled with an opening ceremony attended by government and embassy officials as well as NGO representatives and ECA alumni. The project not only has had a significant impact on the children attending the school but it had a strong impact on other ECA alumni, inspiring and encouraging them to develop develop similar community service projects and events within their own communities.

August 2008

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