sabriye tenberken was born in a village close to cologne in germany like many children there she rode horses and bicycles and went skating on ice and skiing through the countryside at some point during the growing up years she was afflicted with pseudo retinitis pigmentosa a pigmentation of the retina which gradually affects vision and sometimes leads to complete blindnessinitially she went to school with fully sighted children but it was at the age of 12 that she came to terms with the word blind and accepted her condition till then she had been trying to avoid situations in which her lack of sight became obvious children started to tease me and teachers acted in an awkward way the turning point came when i decided to develop a new positive attitude towards blindness i started to look for the advantages and quickly became aware of a few privileges i could focus much better than before i was not easily distracted by visual input i was forced to find my own methods to cope with life and thus became a problem solver and my ability to imagine things improved immensely she saysluckily for her her family was never over protective but trusted in her abilities to discover the world and cope with lifes challenges creative quotient in the family was high with her dad being a musician mother a theatre director and elder brother an artist they even ran a creativity school helping children create their own musicals and this did wonders to sabriyes confidence even after shifting to a boarding school for the blind she had opportunities to do adventure sports such as white water kayaking wind surfing downhill skiing and trampoline jumping because the teachers there believed that these activities provided them the techniques and selfesteem required to take charge of their lives the doors were opened for us to venture into an unknown future she says she recalls that as a child she was hurt when called names like blind fool or disabled donkey but as a teenager she began to look deeper into the motives of those who discriminate people do this because of insecurity if people tried to discourage me from doing something adventurous i knew that most of them couldnt stand the thought that i would be able to do something that they themselves were afraid of doing and this naturally made them aggressive i do feel we all need to apply a new understanding of disability from the birds eye perspective we all are disabled because we cannot fly but this lack can empower imperfection is the mother of invention without our disability to fly we would have never invented air planes once the world understands the power of imperfection discrimination will vanish she saysas part of her study of tibetology in bonn university sabriye created a braille system for the tibetan language in 1997 she took this system to tibet which accepted it as the official tibetan braille script on my first