Directions for the Blind
Ginny, a revert Muslimah, shares her thoughts and feelings on how people sometimes end up doing the opposite of helping a blind person like herself, in an uncommon situation.
All I kept thinking to myself was, if I were sighted, I could have gotten lost and no one would have batted an eye, and I guess to some, I should feel lucky that people “cared” enough to make sure I got home OK. But there is a difference between caring, and treating someone like they’re a complete imbicile, which I’m quite sure I’m not. I guess blind people aren’t supposed to get lost, if we want to avoid drawing attention to ourselves.
Assalamu alaikum, it’s not that people tried to help me that bothers me, it’s the whole assumption that I was incapable of finding my way home and that my being lost necesitated someone calling the police about it, something which would have never happened had I been lost and had any degree of sight. All someone needed to have odne was to have told me where I needed to go and possibly offered to follow at a distance to insure that I got on the right street, but no… This did not happen, all because, supposedly, “they don’t know you around here”, which to me is code for “you’re a strange white woman, with strange clothes walking aroudn in our neighborhood and we’ve never seen you before”. And you’re blind on top of that which must necessarily mean that if we let you try to go home, you’re probably going to get hit by a car or some other such thing befall you.
But anyway, we’ve got a possible tropical storm, or perhaps a hurrican to get ready for, so perhaps by tomorrow, I’ll probably have forgotten all about htis, Inshallah, because the incident really hurt me, as well as lowered my confidence a little. And I consider myself a pretty independent person.