O

n the second floor of an orphanage, three blind children were performing a song entitled Jangan Menyerah (Don’t give up) after breaking their fast together with their peers.

Kuswandi, 15, played a small piano, while Anisa, 13, and Alfiah, 10, were singing. Seven more blind children sitting around them sang along.

Kuswandi, who also plays the cajón, a percussion instrument, wants to be a musician in the future.

These blind children are among the fortunate ones, since they are afforded the opportunity to get free education at Cahaya Quran, a school for children with special needs established by the Tabungan Surga Foundation in Bogor.

Studying at a school for the disabled (SLB) requires a lot of money, but 75 percent of the blind people in Indonesia come from families of a poor socioeconomic background, according to data from the Indonesian Union for the Blind (Pertuni).

“For instance, to study at SLB Sejahtera in Bogor city, a student must [normally] pay an entrance fee of Rp 5 million (US$377) and Rp 250,000 in monthly tuition fees,” Pertuni Bogor chairman Achmad Suryadi Wijaya told The Jakarta Post.

The 64-year-old retired civil servant is also blind.

The high tuition fees meant that few blind children were able to attend school, he said.

“There is this family that has 19 children, five of whom are blind. One is married, while the other four just stay at home, for their parents could not afford to send them to school,” Achmad explained.

Therefore, the Tabungan Surga Foundation is now building an SLB with a dormitory that will provide free education for blind children in Bogor.

Currently the foundation is using a rented building as a school and dormitory for 13 students, which includes three children aged 8 to 11 and ten adults ranging in age from 18 to 35 years.

The school has been running for two years. A new building has been built for the school since its establishment, on land granted by a donor.

Operations there are expected to commence in the new academic year of 2017.

Achmad estimated the number of blind people in Bogor at 904, based on the assumption of an average two blind people in each of Bogor’s 452 villages.

He said most of the blind had been born with normal vision but had suffered high fever that later caused their visual impairment. Achmad said in many cases they also came from poor families and were raised with poor nutrition.

“This situation has developed because they were born in poor families, a situation exacerbated by the fact that they could not afford to give them formal education,” he said.

Achmad himself was not born blind, but severe fever had caused him to lose his eyesight when he was 3 years old.

He started to study at an SLB at the age of 17, and later coped with studying at a regular school for his secondary education.

He has been teaching since 1980. Two colleagues help him in running the school and dormitory: Daden Wiguna, 48, who has a degree for teaching people with visual impairment, and Ibnu Aqsyin, 20, a university student majoring in special needs education. (dra)