Hong Kong Chapter – Dialogue in the Dark 2014

About the Event

Written by Sam GALLER (FS2009-10, Harvard University)

To celebrate the coming of the New Year, a group of Fung Scholars in Hong Kong visited Dialogue in the Dark (DiD) in Mei Foo. Seven Fung Scholars were in attendance, none of whom had previously experienced DiD. A social enterprise originally founded in Germany, DiD aims to promote awareness of the challenges faced by visually impaired people while also offering employment to them. Our guides were visually impaired, and while the event was conducted in total darkness, they were able to confidently guide all of us and lead us through a series of challenges in the dark. I was personally struck by the difficulty of understanding text by touching letters, and other people remarked that the experience really made them think differently about the challenges and adaptations required of the visually impaired.

Feedback from Participants:

CHAN Hiu Laam, Charlotte (FS2010-11, Hong Kong Baptist University) “This is a very special and unique experience. I has been trying to imagine how the life of people who are with vision problems is. This activity brought me the opportunity to make it more realistic and truly to experience their life.”

HUNG On Ying, Cathy (FS2009-10, City University of Hong Kong) “It is a meaningful event that I experienced how visually impaired people live and noticed how much difficulties they have in daily life – something we might think that are easy but indeed could be challenging when it is happening without a visual – such as crossing roads, buying things, finding ways and so forth. Learning from the experience, I think we should be grateful to what we have been given. Although there are times that we might have stress, disappointments or sadness in life, we should be thankful to everything we have – at least we are still living and be able to see this world. Thanks to the Foundation for giving us this opportunity and also Sam for arranging such an inspiring event.”

LAU Yan Yan, Janice (FS2012-13, Chinese University of Hong Kong) “This is a very valuable experience for us to reconsider the importance of our sight and our other senses. We are aware that our sight helps us detect our surroundings and it is “the window of our soul.” But we never truly understand the plight of the visually impaired people. Through this activity, we got a taste of how the blind lead their life by experiencing total darkness. We felt about our surrounding through our senses of touch, smell and hearing. What was interesting was that though our perception of our surrounding was quite similar, it conjured up different pictures of the same setting in our mind. We all “lived” in our own imaginary worlds. Would there be much greater differences between the imagined worlds of the blind and normal-sighted people than between those of the normal-sighted people? How would others’ imagined worlds be like? Actually, this makes me realize that though we are not visually impaired in our real life, we perceive the world differently as well. Usually we are quite self-centred and unconsciously think that the world we perceive is what others perceive. If we understand the subtleties between different people’s understanding of the world, we would be more sympathetic to others.”