Zac Whyte | Community Builder & Media Maker

In the summer of 2009 I answered a classified ad on Craigslist for a person to research NGO’s that aid blind people in China. In 2009-2010 I became a Canadian based technical adviser, graphic designer, web-designer and researcher for Being Blind In China. Being Blind In China was an interactive research and development project for the blind led by 63 year old Canadian man, Bill Moore. Bill has glaucoma and his vision has deteriorated progressively since I met him in the summer of 2009. Bill is an author, a teacher and a traveler who is built a new life in China’s Yunnan Province. Over the course of his time in China, Bill’s blog grew with stories of self-reflection, cultural hiccups, car-crashes, insects, jail time, and hardship. What started as a personal journey for Bill formed into a quest and mission of goodwill. The project ended in the fall of 2010 after some successes and failures, but overall it was a success. Bill now resides in Nelson where he is compiling his blog posts and hopefully, writing a book about his amazing adventure titled – Being Blind In China.

My favorite part of being on this project was Bill’s humour. He would take photographs without actually seeing what he was shooting. But the photos are remarkable because they are taken with senses like hearing, smell, or feeling: a giant spider that crawled over his hand, a river in the forest, a street corner with people drinking tea. The photos captured my imagination and the pretext made me look at them an entirely different way. I can’t really think of anything more insane than moving halfway around the world to a place were I didn’t speak the language, know how to get around, or see. That type of insanity needs support.

There are over 15,000,000 blind people in China who have very limited means to income let alone access to social programs, education, or basic infrastructure to simply remain mobile. It remains a stigma that is seeing slow development in rural communities of China but things are changing slowly.