Published on Jan 16, 2005

Every morning Kamonwan In-aram listens to the news on the radio while sipping her coffee and then takes a motorcycle taxi to her office at Suan Dusit Rajabhat University, where she is an instructor in the education faculty. Before class starts, she sits in front of her computer preparing the day’s lessons for her students. In the evening Kamonwan walks home and cooks some food. If she has some free time she enjoys crocheting, knitting or shopping.

The only difference between her life and the lives of many other people is that Kamonwan is blind.

As a teacher she has proved to her students that the idea of living a “normal” life is not just for people who can see.

“Education is the key to bridging the gap so that disabled people can live a normal life,” said Kamonwan, who is also the head of support services for persons with disabilities of the school’s Special Study Centre. She added that well-educated disabled people had an easier time adapting themselves to society. They can take care of themselves, and an education will give them more chances to get jobs they want.

“Disabled people need not to be kept at home. At the very least they should receive some sort of training, because it will encourage sensory development and help them associate with other people,” she said.

The Si Sa Ket-born Kamonwan became blind after an accident when she was eight years old. Her family decided to send her to a boarding school for the blind in Bangkok until she finished high school. she went on to receive her bachelor’s degree at Suan Dusit Teacher College. There she made history as the first blind student to study alongside students with normal sight.

She said that in order to keep pace with her sighted peers she had to work harder out of class, transcribing the lectures from tapes and then having a resource teacher explain them to her. After finishing her bachelor’s degree, Kamonwan worked as a teacher at Amnatcharoen Songkroa School for three years before obtaining a government scholarship to pursue her master’s degree in a special education programme at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

For the past eight years Kamonwan has been teaching Thai and English Braille to students who want to become instructors for the blind at Suan Dusit Rajabhat University. She generally has about 20 students in each of her classes, she said. Her teaching style focuses on participatory activities and question-and-answer sessions, which, in addition to involving her students in their work, have the added advantage of guaranteeing that they don’t skip class.

“None of my students, blind or sighted, have ever been unemployed. There is very high demand for teachers for disabled people, and the university can produce only around 100 grads a year,” she said.

Kamonwan added that there was currently high demand for teachers of home economics for the blind.

She said that many people had the impression that teaching blind people was much more difficult than teaching other types of disabled people.

“Many teachers think that to make people understand they have to make eye contact, which the blind obviously cannot do. In fact, teaching the deaf is also difficult, because they need to have a translator to communicate information between the teacher and students,” she said.

Kamonwan said disabled students had started to receive more attention from society in recent times. Last week the Education Ministry organised the “Thai Disabled Genius” event to give disabled students from all over the country a chance to showcase their capabilities for the public. Kamonwan said that such events would do much for society’s acceptance of disabled students.

Despite this good news, however, she added that it was still very difficult to find schools willing to allow blind children to study with normal children.

“Many schools say they don’t have a policy to support this group of people and that they are afraid that [accepting blind students] would interfere with their teachers’ ability to instruct normal students,” she said.

In addition to helping blind students find a place in the world as teachers, Kamonwan has been a board member of the National Institution of the Blind since 2000 and treasurer of the Thailand Association of the Blind (TAB Group) for four years. There are more than 3,000 members in TAB Group, and that is growing.

Kamonwan said it was very important for blind people to have the chance to choose whatever job they wanted and for the public to give blind people the opportunity.

“Disabled people still depend a lot on luck, not rights, when it comes to finding work,” she said.

BY THEERANUCH PUSAKSRIKIT