In the Spotlight
Helen Keller
A Childhood Without Sight or Sound
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” ~ Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. For the first two years of her life she was a perfectly healthy little girl. However, before she even learned how to speak, scarlet fever struck Keller and she lost the ability to see and hear. She would remain blind and deaf for the rest of her life.
Life for a child who could not see, hear, or speak was very different and difficult. Keller could not communicate when she needed something as simple as a glass of water or bite of food. While other children could see the beautiful colours of the world around her and play to their hearts’ content, Keller’s world was always dark and quiet.
Despite the difficulties Keller faced with communication, her parents did not give up on her. They hired a teacher to come to instruct Keller – Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Sullivan was 20 years old then and had already graduated from the Perkins School for the Blind. She was also visually impaired when she was a child and she came to be Keller’s lifesaver when Keller was only 7 years old.
Growing With Extraordinary Excellence
“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.” ~ Helen Keller
After a period of learning how to connect words with objects by spelling out the words in Keller’s palm, the young pupil finally made the crucial connection. The first word Keller ever understood was “water,” which she learned while pumping water from a well with Sullivan. Keller was quoted at the age of 11 with saying,
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.” This is testament to the person Keller had become due to the challenges she faced at such a young age. From then on, Keller worked with Sullivan to learn every word she could.
By the time Keller was 13, she attended the Wright-Humason school for the deaf in New York. Keller was the only student who was deaf and blind, but Sullivan was there to help her read everything and signed what she read into Keller’s hand. During this time, Keller learnt extremely fast and was even learning how to speak. Not letting her disabilities hinder her at all, Keller soon mastered other ways of communicating, including reading in Braille, touch-lip reading, and typing. Later Keller became an excellent standard typist, even better than Sullivan. Soon Keller decided she wanted to go to college, something that was unheard of for a deaf-blind child. She began attending classes at Radcliffe College in 1900, earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1904. She was the first blind and deaf person who had ever accomplished this. Keller even graduated cum laude (with distinctions).
Keller continued to learn throughout the rest of her life. However, her new classroom was the world. She set off to serve the public by learning everything she could about working with people who had disabilities including blindness. While she never was able to see with her own eyes, Keller brought vision to thousands
of individuals through her work. Keller said, “We are never really happy until we try to brighten the lives of others.” She established the Helen Keller International organisation in 1915 so to provide funding and research to study the leading causes of blindness, as well as malnutrition, in order to find ways of prevention.
As more and more people heard about Keller’s deafblind disability, and her great success as a person with disabilities, she became popular all around the world. Everyone wanted to meet this person who had been through such great difficulties yet had worked so hard to help others. She was a hero to people in the United States, as well as overseas in places as far as Japan. News of her extraordinary accomplishments reached various parts of the world even though there was no television! Keller used her popularity to help others. She worked closely with the United States Senate to make improvements for people with disabilities. As a result, Keller was a cofounder of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) in 1920, a national organisation that still exists today to help people in need.
Her Limitless Influence
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” ~ Helen Keller
While Sullivan had remained by Keller’s side consistently during this time, in 1932 Sullivan lost her own eyesight. She died in 1936. However, this did not deter Keller from continuing with her own work. She found another assistant, Polly Thompson, who would continue to be Keller’s eyes and ears as Keller travelled around the world working with those less fortunate than she.
When she was 66 years old, the age when most Americans start to retire, Keller was about to embark on her greatest journey. In 1946, she began serving as an international relations counsellor for the American Foundation of the Overseas Blind. For the next 11 years, Keller travelled abroad to every continent except Antarctica, which includes Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and South America, to 39 countries. Her most difficult journey was a 40,000-mile tour across the continent of Asia; it took her five months to complete the trip. She was 75 years old at the time. As she travelled around the world, Keller used her own struggles to inspire others. She shared her personal story and experiences as a deaf-blind adult who had moved past her disability to help others.
Keller is considered one of the most influential humanitarians from the 20th century. A humanitarian is someone who looks past the differences in people, such as a disability or skin colour, in order to help them to live a better and more fulfilled life through kindness and positive actions. Keller believed that every person has the same rights, dreams, hopes, and fears as everyone else. She spent her entire adulthood working to help make the world a better place.
During her time of service, Keller won several very important awards and acknowledgements. Even though she did not return to college, she was given honorary doctoral degrees from dozens of universities, including Harvard and Temple. Colleges overseas in India, Germany, Scotland, and South Africa also gave Keller honorary doctoral degrees. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal, both of which are top honours for any American citizen.
While she lived with an assistant for the greatest part of her life, Keller never found a husband, and she never had children. In 1961, when Keller was 80 years old, she suffered from several strokes, which forced her to cease her long distance travels. She passed away peacefully in her sleep on June 1, 1968 at 87 years old. Even after all these years, her remarkable story of perseverance and desire to succeed even in adversity is still a powerful motivation for many of us today.