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A young girl uses a Next Generation Perkins Brailler

 The NEW Next Generation™ Perkins Brailler

Braillers to Baghdad

Perkins Products ships 20 Perkins Braillers across the globe to school for the blind

Picture from CNN video of Baghdad school with teacher and students
Photo credit: CNN.com. Watch the video on CNN's website.

One March morning, David Morgan, general manager of Perkins Products, channel surfed over to CNN to see what was happening in the world. He saw Kyra Phillips’s story about the Al Noor School for the Blind in Baghdad, an entire school with zero braille typewriters. He felt he had to do something.

In October, a truck rolled up to Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, MA, and loaded 20 Perkins Braillers®, four reams of special braille paper and a 72-volume braille Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary for the school. (Perkins Braille & Talking Book Library supplied the dictionary as part of the gift.)

On Sunday, October 12 at one o’clock in the afternoon – Baghdad time – the Al Noor School got their braillers. The teacher now has an English dictionary to use in preparing lessons, plus a gift of 75 brand-new sunglasses donated by the American Harley-Davidson of Leominster.

CNN’s Kyra Phillips has been involved from the earliest stages to tell the story. Her zeal fueled everyone’s spirit. Watch video of the story on CNN.com.

Education is key to personal and financial independence for someone who is blind. Literacy is the core of education. Braille is essential to literacy. No audio recording can replace the ability to read a book. No computer can replace the power of writing one’s own thoughts on paper. Braille is pencil and paper to people who are blind.

A teacher in Jordan with a student who is visually impaired
A teacher works with a student who is visually impaired in Jordan.

Morgan is well aware of the power of braille to unlock a student’s potential. He runs, in his words, a “mission-based business.” The non-profit manufacturing division of Perkins School for the Blind makes the Perkins Brailler, the most widely used braille typewriter in the world. Perkins Products marketing director Laura Matz determined the school’s need. She and Morgan found all the available braillers they could spare and offered a gift of 20 machines – doubling the school’s capacity to teach brailling to blind children in Baghdad.

Next, Perkins International partnered with International Relief and Development (IRD) – an international nonprofit that facilitates aid in hard-to-reach places – to arrange shipping. IRD arranged and funded shipping through Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. It was Dr. David Elkins, leader of IRD’s Community Stabilization Program in Iraq, who brought the supplies to the school. In an email Sunday evening he wrote, “I had a great time and feel fortunate to play a small role in getting these materials to the school... I think I put sunglasses on 40 kids or so.”

Shipping braillers to the Baghdad school is just one of the ways Perkins International is expanding its efforts in the Middle East.

Why rally all those resources? Morgan sums up, “Learning is critical to any child’s well-being, self-esteem and independence. Now, it’s hard to imagine the challenges that children in a war zone face. If a gift from Perkins Products can help the students at the Al Noor School overcome some of those challenges, we felt we had to step up. So many people worked with Perkins to make this happen – the media, an NGO, the military chaplain in Baghdad – the mission of educating children who are blind brings us all together. That’s what this is about.”