A BLIND boy is guided as he touches for the first time a pot-bellied Vietnamese pig during an interaction tour of the Manila Zoo organized by parents and photographers. REM ZAMORA
MANILA, Philippines—For a few hours that sun-dappled Saturday, 18 blind children went on an urban safari and conquered fear.
And egging them on was Ian, the 25-year-old photography buff with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), whose amazing pictures were featured by the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net) three weeks ago.
The children, along with Ian and 15 other photo hobbyists, turned up for a morning pictorial on April 19 at the Manila Zoo, where they got to pet and ride some exotic animals for the first time, as cameras clicked away and delighted parents looked on.
“I had only heard of snakes from Robin Padilla on TV,” said Eugemar Garcia, who at 16 is in grade school in Quezon City. The shy teener was alluding to Padilla’s current action hero character “Joaquin Bordado” whose animal tattoos, including that of a serpent, magically morph into his flesh-and-blood minions.
“Now I know how it feels. It’s long, smooth and cold, and it can curl up in a coil,” Eugemar said in Filipino, minutes after stroking an albino Burmese python.
The children were also allowed to pet some birds, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, a turtle and a crocodile about a yard long whose mouth had been shut tight with adhesive tape.
“I thought it was a rock,” said Camille Michaela Mercado, 10, who mounted the turtle.
“Takbo! Takbo! (Giddyup!),” Cedric Albert Tan, 8, was heard yelling on his turn to ride the same stoic creature.
Jason knows
Been there, done that, said the precocious fast-talking Jason Dacayanan, who said his family had already brought him to the zoo thrice and that it was not his first time to pet the resident miniature horse, the ostrich or Maali, the elephant.
But when asked what he would tell other blind children to help them overcome their fears of the hairy, the wrinkled and (sometimes) the smelly animals, 10-year-old Jason took a long pause.
Finally, the boy said, “Nand’yan lang ang Diyos (God is just around).”
How it began
It all began with a parent’s reaction to an Inquirer story. On April 14, the paper carried the letter of Linda Choy, an insurance underwriter and mother of a 9-year-old blind girl named Rose Kara.
Choy related how she was moved by the Inquirer’s front-page story about Ian (April 6). She also thanked advertising photographer John Chua, who had discovered Ian’s photographic eye and shared his wonderful find with the paper.
Choy wrote: “Blind people are hard to photograph. Most of them droop their heads. Will any photographer take the challenge to photograph our children? We belong to a support group of parents with visually impaired children.”
Special as stars
Choy and Chua got in touch by e-mail—and came up with a plan for the children. “I was just encouraging the paper to come out with more stories like that about Ian. I never thought it would lead to something like this,” Choy said in an interview during the pictorial.
“Now, our children get to feel very special as stars,” said Choy, a former vice president of Parent Advocates for Visually Impaired Children (PAVIC). The support group, formed in 1999, currently counts more than 350 families nationwide as members.
PAVIC holds parents’ congresses and helps them prepare their blind children for school through “subsidized therapy sessions” designed to address speech, attention-deficit or motor coordination problems, and other barriers to social interaction, she said.
Tactile exercises
“Without these early interventions, it is difficult to enroll them even in Grade 1. They cannot adapt to school life,” she explained.
Though not a therapist herself, Choy believed the zoo trip was a step in the same positive direction.
Two years ago, she recalled, PAVIC brought the children to a fire station in Manila so they could “feel” the size and different parts of a fire truck—and thus be able to relate whenever grownups talked about fires or the children themselves heard the sirens.
Such “tactile” exercises, however, were not all play but were meant to help “some of our multi-handicapped children who are not only blind but also have an aversion to touch,” Choy said. She was referring to one of the symptoms of Sensory Integration Disorder (SID).
Music and voices
“A child with SID—whether blind or sighted—is one whose senses do not function or process properly. As a result, an act which is perfectly normal to an average child may be very annoying or intolerable to one who has the disorder,” she said.
“They may be allergic to certain textures and won’t touch even their food, sand or anything slimy or feathery. Some don’t want others to touch them in the face, which used to be the case with my daughter. Some can’t stand loud music or too many voices at the same time.”
Parents and caretakers of blind children with SID are advised to “give the kids a deep slow massage, or run a fine-tooth comb over their arms and legs (to help them) relax and become more focused on tasks. Some children are made to sit or go barefoot in sand boxes.”
Overcoming fear
Fellow PAVIC mother Jeanette Tamonte said her son John Bosco, 11, grew up “afraid of hairy animals like dogs and cats—and even stuffed toy animals.”
That Saturday morning, John was photographed with a small crocodile on his lap, his Braille-trained fingertips exploring the reptile’s scales. “This is about overcoming that fear,” Choy said.
For the photographers, “this is not a contest,” said Chua, who served as the lead organizer of the project and did not take pictures himself. “This is between the photographer and the special child, the relationship they can have.”
At least 15 members of Pipho (Pinoy Photography) took part in the shoot from 8 a.m. to noon. Chua said zoo administrator Deo Manimbo waived the entrance fee while Canon Marketing Philippines provided free printing services on site.
The 16th photographer
Pipho member Mel Enriquez said “the challenge” of having the blind as a subject was their usually “'bowed heads”—the same observation made by Choy in her letter to the Inquirer.
“They only have [our] voices to guide them so you really have to communicate,” said Enriquez, who is also a former teacher for special children with ASD and down syndrome.
A 16th photographer and non-Pipho member who was also on the scene, however, had an apparently simpler approach to this challenge.
Accompanied by his parents and a caregiver, Ian, the ASD-stricken lensman whose story started it all, seemed to blend well with the other shutterbugs, drawing no special attention from anyone except when he had to tell his young subjects:
“Don’t be scared. That’s the tail. I'll take a picture of you. Don’t be scared.”
Copyright 2009 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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