Fien Adriani: Willing and Able

Bank employee Fien Adriani lists her interests as playing the piano, collecting perfume and listening to music (Phil Collins is a favorite). She loves learning languages: she has a degree in German literature, speaks excellent English and is currently mastering Mandarin. She also happens to be visually impaired. Bruce Emond meets her.

Fien Adriani’s mother first noticed something was wrong when her daughter was a few months old. The little girl did not respond to light or follow objects with her eyes.

A visit to the doctor confirmed her fears: The baby’s vision was obscured by a coating on her eyes. An operation was attempted when she was six months old, but the results were not as hoped. Every year, Fien remembers matter of factly, until she was about 12, her parents would try something new in the hope of restoring their daughter’s sight. Maybe this time the treatment would work… It never did.

But her visual impairment has not stopped the Help Desk employee in the Corporate Real Estate Service team of Standard Chartered Bank from living her life.

“I’m a stubborn person,” Fien, 37, says at the bank’s headquarters in Central Jakarta. “If someone says I can’t do something, then I say, ‘who says?’ That is, when it’s still within my abilities. Just don’t ask me to read or drive a car – I’ll have a crash my first time out!”

She has needed that determination and sense of humor in facing problems that sighted citizens never give a second thought, including getting around the city (on the day after this interview, a blind man was spotted doing his best to navigate the potholes and cracked sidewalks of Jl. Rasuna Said in Kuningan, South Jakarta). She travels by motorbike with her brother from her Bekasi home, and uses a stick to guide her around the office.

There is also the prejudice faced by the physically handicapped, especially in the assumption that physical and intellectual limitations are one and the same. The country’s fourth president, Abdurrahman Wahid, who was visually impaired, was often the subject of patronizing comments in the vein of how he could be expected to lead if he could not see what was going on around him.

Fien experienced that attitude, although often with kind intentions, in previous workplaces.

“People would say, ‘Oh, you can’t do that,’” she says about serving customers. “And I would say, ‘Well, what do I need to do? Get them to fill in the application form and a copy of their ID?’ I always made sure to ask permission from my supervisors before doing anything.”

Fien is confident and articulate, and she credits her parents for their support. “They never treated me as blind. And they always looked for a solution.”

Because she was visually impaired and not classified as completely blind, Fien attended a regular school. Still, she also needed to read and write in Braille,

“The teachers helped. If the teacher was writing on the blackboard, they would read it out to me so I could take it down. But sometimes they’d exclaim, ‘I’m tired of this’,” Fien says with a laugh.

Her first taste of work after graduating from the School of Foreign Languages was as an English teacher in her hometown Bandung. She taught Teh Ninieh, the first wife of famed cleric Aa Gymnastiar. Word soon spread of her teaching skills, and she gained a roster of students.

She moved on to working as an operator and member of the customer service team at a tour and travel firm and a holding company, both owned by Aa Gym. She joined Standard Chartered this year.

Simon Morris, chief executive officer of Standard Chartered Indonesia, says there has been growing recognition at the bank over the past 10 years for the need to diversify the workplace and make it more inclusive for the differently abled.

“I think it’s important to use that term instead of disabled or handicapped, because there is a negative stereotype associated with them,” he says.

It is a global effort by the bank, and Morris does not want Indonesia to be left behind. Hiring Fien was part of that effort but it is a learning process. She uses a screen reader for her work, although Morris acknowledges there is still more to be done.

“I always ask Fien to tell us what she needs,” says Morris, who describes Fien as a “very independent lady”. “I hope she’ll be able to say to us, ‘I need this’ or ‘this isn’t working’ … once we have that cracked then we will be able to hire more differently abled people.”

Morris believes that one day hiring in Indonesia will be about the talent people bring to the table, not whether they fit ideals of physical perfection.

“It’s like one of the Asian sayings: the hardest part of a journey is the first step,” he says.

Fien puts it her own way. “I have to motivate others,” she says. “The world is not only for them (the physically able). The world is strong so we must be strong for the world to be soft to us.”

Photos by Ricky Yudhistira

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