Blind and without any education till he was 18 years old, Raj Tribhuwan today plays a leadership role in a community of persons with disabilities in Ontario, Canada. He has come a long way from his roots at Enmore, East Coast Demerara.
Tribhuwan celebrated his 50th birthday in 2009 with the launch of the Raj Tribhuwan Foundation, a non-profit organization he set up to contribute to the lives of visually impaired people in Guyana.
“I visited Guyana in 1995 and 1998 at Christmas time. And I was heart broken to see the lack of opportunity people of disability still face there. I want to make a difference,” he told Stabroek News in an exclusive interview in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on a snowy, wintery day last week.
Tribhuwan came through a long journey of migration from his boyhood days at Enmore, where he struggled as a blind boy to discover a world where he sees nothing.
Today he plays guitar in a band of blind musicians at events all across Ontario, he serves as president of a social club for visually impaired Canadians, he plays for worship teams in church, and he is a leading teacher of accessibility technology in Canada.
“Life has been a tremendous learning experience for me. And I enjoy using what I have learned to contribute to the lives of people with disabilities. I like seeing people live normally and independently, no matter what their physical challenge may be.”
He works with a Canadian organization called Balance for Blind Adults, teaching accessibility technology that allows people with disabilities to live normal independent lives in Canada. He also works for the Helen Keller organization in Ontario, which is dedicated to teaching the deaf accessibility technology.
“I set up the foundation to bring this kind of service to Guyana,” he said.
He plans to travel to Guyana later this year to network with relevant government departments and other organizations to make his vision a reality.
“I want to see accessibility technology at such places as the National Library, the University of Guyana, St Rose’s High School’s Centre for the Visually Impaired, the David Rose School for the Handicapped, the National Institute for the Blind, and other centres in rural areas such as Linden, New Amsterdam and Anna Regina. I want to see people with disability be able to live independent, normal lives in Guyana,” Tribhuwan said.
Yet, Tribhuwan does not see himself being able to re-migrate and live in Guyana. “That would be hard, because the services available here in Canada are not there. But I would go back home to make a difference. I want to contribute, and from that perspective I am going back there, to share what I have learned so people there can live independently despite their disability,” he said.
Tribhuwan lives a unique life. He has a brother, Subash, 43, who is also blind. Both became blind as children while living at Enmore.
Tribhuwan said he could see with one eye till he was six years old, when he became permanently blind in both eyes.
Born in 1959, he grew up in the rural Guyana society in a large, poor family. His family squatted on land aback of Enmore after they had to run away from their home in Victoria village during the political turmoil of the 1960s.
The move left a bitter scar in the family’s psyche.
While his father drove a taxi for a living, his mother raised the eight children. But life was always a struggle for them as the country gained independence and stumbled forward under the clouds of political turmoil and the memory of the racial disturbances.
Tribhuwan tried as best he could to live in his world of seeing nothing and being able to do nothing. His childhood was frequently spent sitting listening to his brothers and sisters play. They went to school and did chores. He stayed home and did nothing.
He remembers walking in the yard and bumping into objects and falling. He was constantly walking into stuff.
As he grew he learned to own the yard as his domain, and eventually took part in games such as cricket and “tire racing”, aided by his cousin and siblings. He also went for walks on the seawall with his cousin.
But he and Subash faced a dismal future.
When he was 18 years old, the boys were enrolled at the David Rose School for the Handicapped, where they started to learn Braille. They grasped this opportunity with both hands and excelled, topping the school in exams.
Less than two years later, Tribhuwan’s father suffered a crippling stroke and could not drive them anymore to school. Their school days in Guyana were over.
However, they took up the guitar, and aided by a kind member of the Merritones Orchestra who taught them at his house for free, they practiced for hours a day. Both are proficient and expert at the guitar.
But by 1980, despite the year of Braille schooling and the new guitar skills, Tribhuwan was becoming an adult with little prospect of a good life in the rapidly deteriorating economic situation in Guyana, where the government had banned certain basic food items.
His mother was concerned. Almost in desperation, she made the brave move to migrate her family to Suriname, a country where, she had heard, Guyanese people could work and earn money and eat good food.
However, on the day Tribhuwan and his mother crossed the border into Suriname, February 25, 1980, the military under Desi Bouterse, executed a coup and overthrew the Surinamese government.
“We were in limbo for two days, not knowing what to do. A kind family put us up in Nickerie. Later that week we travelled quietly to Paramaribo, hoping to make a better life for ourselves. We never once thought of turning back and going back to Guyana. Life there was way too hard,” he said.
“I think Guyanese people are survivors, and to survive sometimes you need to drift, to migrate in search of survival. We found with food banned and Guyana falling apart that we could not survive there. My parents had faced the racial wrath of the 1960s. My mother was not going to see her children suffer without trying something. She could only move out of the country. She could only migrate. That’s what we did. That’s what a lot of people did. People had to find a way, somehow, to survive, find employment, make a living.”
Tribhuwan said living in Guyana was “hard. There was no opportunity there for people like myself. If I had stayed there I would just have been surviving. The economy was rock bottom. In fact, when I was in Guyana back then, it was a sister who was already in Suriname who sent us money to support the family. Only that way could we buy food,” he said.
Tribhuwan said rural life is Guyana is tougher than in Georgetown.
His exposure to Braille school in Georgetown, and his guitar lessons gave him so much confidence and hope that he started teaching music at the St Rose’s School for the Visually Impaired. “But the pay was so low that by the time I paid the bus fare to get from Enmore to Georgetown, I had nothing left to live on.” He soon gave it up.
So there he was in 1980, facing “starting a whole new life” in Suriname. He had to learn again how to move around, to identify markings so he didn’t stumble over objects he could not see and injure himself.
Yet, “the economy was so much better than Guyana. I got involved with a church there run by American missionaries. I also worked doing anything I could help with at an English Christian school. I would run the supply shop and teach music. I did youth counselling. Such opportunities were not available in Guyana.
“My quality of life increased so much just by migrating from Guyana to Suriname. Suriname was way, way better. But we were in a new society, in a different culture and where people spoke a different language. My family sacrificed a lot. We left all our stuff behind in Guyana and came to this new country to live in a small space. It was hard, but it was an investment in our future. We found work easily, and we saved and we built. In Guyana we could not do that.”
He said as a blind person he always felt isolated and alone in Guyana. He could not play with the children in the street. “I could not go to the cinema or have a girlfriend. I could not go to school. There was no education for me and Subash.”
Despite his hard childhood, the love and support of his family took him through, and even today sees him live an accomplished, easy life in Canada.
He remembers his love of putting things together. Someone showed him how to put together a go-cart and a scooter. He would spend hours making one, even assembling the wheels.
This sense of curiosity and exploration came in handy when he moved to join another sister in Ontario, Canada. Eventually the entire family moved from Suriname to Canada.
In 1993, he boarded a plane as a new Canadian resident. It was April, the start of spring but with enough traces of the winter that he felt the cold’s harsh bite as he set foot out of the Pearson International Airport in Ontario.
Laughing, he said he felt “as if the whole country was air-conditioned”. Now, he navigates the snow and the cold with ease, using only his cane as an aid.
But moving to Canada was another transition of enormous challenge to him. Not only did he have to learn to live in a winter country, but he had to prepare for a new way of life. “I decided to commit to make up what I had missed in my education and my work. I wanted to build a career, and to play a part in the society.” This he set out to do.
He joined the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, where he started learning computer programming, customer service skills and about being Canadian. He learned mobility, cooking and doing daily household chores, with paid workers training him “to live normally and independently”. It was all paid for by the Canadian government as a service to the community of persons with disabilities.
He also discovered books. “When I found in the library thousands and thousands of audio books, I became a voracious reader. In that first year I read about 250 books. My education had started.” He became self-taught and developed a keen interest in education, eventually completing several college-level training programmes.
Tribhuwan said after he visited Guyana in 1998, “I came back to Canada with a heavy heart.
“There are people in Guyana with talent and skills and potential. And they are going to waste. They are wasting away from lack of opportunities. I thought I would make money here and send it back to them. But then the idea of the Foundation sounded better to me. So that’s what I am doing.”
He is currently raising funds and receiving donations of accessibility technology equipment, to set up in Guyana.
He also wants to teach and train people in Guyana to spread the accessibility technology tools around so that it becomes a way of life in the country. “Accessibility technology allows anyone, no matter what their physical disability, to live and work independently and normally. Guyana desperately needs this.
“I want to bring out the ability in people, to see them realize their potential, which the rest of society does not even see these people have. Society disregards these people. Society writes off these people.
“But imagine life in total darkness, with no light, not even a candle or a match could be found. You grope around in this heavy darkness, lost and unable to even move with confidence. With accessibility technology, you are giving visual aids to the blind, and other aids to those who have disabilities.”
Yet, he is concerned that Guyana suffers from “bad government and selfish leadership. The country suffered so long. Imagine, we came down to basic survival and people had to leave just to survive. The racial problems coming from the top was started a long time ago. That’s where the problem lies. Everyone suffers because of it.”
Tribhuwan said people in Guyana do not receive “the right tools to grow, to live and build. There is so much corruption.
“Even now, crime robs people of a sense of security. And those who are in high positions take away whatever tools are there and give to their own. If you have friends in government you get good jobs and you get the tools.
“But not the ordinary person, especially the poor and disabled. Persons with disability are not respected. They are still being thrown a bone. They need training, education, and the opportunity to perform independently in the normal society.”
Tribhuwan said his heart is to contribute to the country, “because there are people there still in the same place where I was once at – hopeless and lost with a dismal future.
“Here in Canada I cannot be happy, eating and making merry in this good Canadian life while I know there are people there who suffer so much. I want to use my Canadian blessing as a way to contribute back.”
He said people with disabilities in Guyana face a key problem, in that they cannot easily communicate with the rest of the society. “With computers and accessibility technology that allow audio books and so on to be easily and readily available so people could educate themselves, people would be able to live normally and independently.”
This Enmore boy moved to Canada through Suriname and achieved his dreams. Daily, he teaches people who migrate to Canada from every corner of the globe, in Toronto. And his heart craves to return to Guyana and take his skills and knowledge to his homeland.
Tribhuwan could not read or write at 18 years old as an Enmore teenager. He knows what that lack of opportunity feels like. And he has not forgotten. Today he reads, writes, teaches and serves Canadians with disabilities with excellence. He has made friends from all over the world.
“I dream of being able to contribute this blessing to Guyana, the society that I came from,” he said.
