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<< There were six cups: two red, two black, two green, they were also imported, unbreakable, modern. They had come as a present from Enriqueta, on Mariana´s last birthday, and from that day they liked to say that one could combine a cup of one color with a saucer of another >>, so begins a story by Mario Benedetti, a story of colors, lights, and shadows… A story that resembles the eyes of Yenny Lorena Tintinago Hormiga, her colors and her lights, her lights and her shadows.

Yenny´s story begins 10 years ago in La Sierra, department of Cauca, Colombia, when at the age of eight months she came a little earlier to claim her place on this earth, to sign the southern valleys of the country with her stay.

Her encounter with the world, from that instant, has been crossed in a thorny way, filled with many brave battles. When she was a child she was very thin, due to a problem with her stomach. She had to spend her days under the technical embrace of an incubator and was kept away from her biological mother… meters away from the love and warmth of her mom. Yenny was weak when she was born. That is why, when she was barely one week old, her defenseless body had to endure the dense environment of the surgery rooms of a clinic, and several hours of medical operations.

Later, three months after her birth, her grandmother –who is haven to her since their first contact of love- broke into tears when she discovered that the light of her life, little Yenny, did not have light in her own eyes… “I saw the other children look at their parents, and smile at each other when they met face to face; and me, instead, I would wave my hand over my girl´s face, and little Yenny wouldn´t

BY: HENRY GARCÍA GAVIRIA

With the eyes and heart in hand

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move, she couldn´t see me, she wouldn´t react. I ran to look for the doctor to tell him that my little girl couldn´t see, that she was blind. That was the saddest day of my life: I ran out and sat crying on the sidewalk for hours, inconsolable, alone. I wondered about how much my girl was going to suffer in this life, how was she going to walk, to study, to work, to go out on the street. Those were long hours of anguish and weeping”. Meanwhile, in the bosom of her incubator, little Yenny, indifferent of everything, even light, was breathing in her own darkness.

Her grandmother´s faith, her grandfather´s sacrifices and the solidarity of many good human beings, filled with strength and purpose the heart of a girl, who despite the troubles of the road, was cultivating her own story, her own garden, as Borges said. With the drive and humbleness that real farmers always have had, Yenny began to grow, to walk, to fall, to get up, to go to therapies for blind children, to discover the world and to dream those barefoot children dreams; with blissful looks that live in an eternal present.

Months went by, and little Yenny, who was struggling between earth and her own heaven, had decided to stay. And to stay, she needed to understand the world with her eyes, with her hands. Feel to see. There was no doubt that her battles of grace were just beginning and that there would be many along the journey.

To better understand her reality and learn how to read the world, Yenny, given the conditions of her village, had to commute from La Sierra (Cauca) to the city of Cali, in a different department, to attend special therapies that would allow her to see with her hands. That was a long and costly commute for a family which depended on cornflowers and tomato harvests. And so, many years went by. And with the smiles of Yenny and her Grandmother, it was beautiful.

A short while later, she began studying in a school which had six classrooms for eleven different grades. In her classroom there were children from first, second and third grade. For logical or illogical reasons, the little girl didn´t have a good time in that place. She came home wishing she did not have to come back to school. At that time sadness came back to her eyes and to the bahareque1 house.

One day, hoping to understand the cause of her little girl’s anguish, Margarita Hormiga –her grandmother– stopped at the school entrance, after leaving her granddaughter in class. She turned back, and stood by the classroom window glimpsing a bitter scene. What she saw through the fence made her feel as if her soul was torn into two: a sad lonely girl, painfully staring at the horizon. Margarita was crying inside.

Yenny dropped out of school and took for a while the lessons of her grandparents, two kind relatives who deserve all the gratitude and love that their little girl shows when she touches their faces with her soft innocent hands.

Nevertheless, the long awaited day would come. Almost by chance, a blind teacher spoke to them about the Rafael Maya Departmental Public Library in the city of Popayán: the institution that would change Yenny´s life and which would put her back on the path of happiness. “That teacher told us that in the library they could teach Yenny how to see with her hands, to write, to read, to learn about space, to add, to subtract. I was very excited.”

And so they visited the library, saw the room for people experiencing disabilities, they met an exemplary teacher with a whole life of experience alongside blind people and they registered Yenny in the library, a place that would open many doors for her. “The only things they asked for were our identification numbers”, says her grandmother. “And that´s nothing for so many benefits. It´s nothing”.

1 Aconstructionwithwallsmadeofsticksandreedsinterwoveninmud.

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From that moment on, smiles grew in the bahareque house, and in Yenny´s life: she learned to write letters and numbers in Braille, to read many words, to distinguish animal shapes and geometric shapes. Her unquestionable ability surpasses any possible admiration: “Sweater, Soup, Apple, Fox”, she read with accuracy, she can differentiate the letters and knows the meaning of every word. She understands the writing in this system with such ease, that her grandmother can´t hide her smile of pride and satisfaction. Her face is filled with drawings of joy when little Yenny lets out the exact words set in the Braille notebook.

“Horse, Sheep, Chicken, Rooster, Spider, Camel, Cow, Bull”, she recognizes the shapes of these animals, their habitats and some of their features. It is a privilege to be by her side when she shares how she sees the world with her hands, and when her teacher at the public library instructs her on how to master her sense of touch. “It pleases me so much to see my girl making so much progress and to see her so happy. She waits anxiously for the class days in the library. And we are always willing to make an effort to bring her to the library because it makes us all very happy. My little girl has learned so much here”.

Yenny uses the typewriter keyboard in Braille, and she records the words the teacher says. She stops for an instant and says that her dream is to use computers and tablets: “On the computer you write, and you place your hands like you do on this machine and the computer talks to you. The computer tells you what you need to write. I want to read on the computer, talk through the computer, listen to music on the computer and see the news on the computer. But first, you need to learn Braille”.

“I want to see the Telethon on the computer, and write messages to the disabled through the computer… When you write on it, they read the messages that you send to the people on TV. That´s the show that I like the most… Because they have a lot of disabled people there. I want to travel by plane and be with them”. That is probably the most sincere desire of this exemplary girl, a girl who stands in the limits of the extraordinary, of the magical.

A few years ago she had a calf, and with the help of her grandfather she fed it so it would grow beautiful. Yenny loved the calf, like Rosa and Pinín, the children from the short story by Leopoldo Alas, which loved their lamb << In the silence, in the inactive calm, there was love. The siblings loved each other like two parts of a green fruit, bound by the same life, with scarce consciousness of what was different in them or what separated them; Pinín and Rosa loved the Lamb big, yellowish, whose forehead seemed like a cradle… It could be said that the Lamb, as far as it is possible to guess these things, also loved the twins in charge of grazing it >>.

Yenny knew that someday she would have to say goodbye to her calf, but for good reasons, to fulfill a dream: buying a computer to learn how to write messages for the Telethon. Then, the unexpected happened: neither her beloved calf nor the computer were there. Yenny´s grandparents had to sell the calf to be able to build over their bahareque house a wooden room for their precious granddaughter. The calf was gone, like the Lamb from the story of Rosa and Pinín…

<< (…) the following Saturday Pinín accompanied his father to the Wetland. The child looked horrified at the meat dealers, who were the tyrants of the market. A man from Castile bought the Lamb for a fair price. Branded, she returned to her shed in Puao, already sold, somebody else’s, her bell sadly ringing. A sullen Antón walked behind her with Pinín, whose eyes were like fists. When she heard about the sale, Rosa wrapped her arms around the Lamb’s neck. She bowed her head just as she did when they submitted her to the yoke. ‘There goes the old girl,’ the unsociable Antón thought to himself, broken-hearted.  She is an animal, but its children had no other mother or grandmother >>.

The calf episode resembles Rosa and Pinín´s story, and remains in Yenny´s memory, just like the desire to learn to use computers and tablets remains. A desire that comes closer of being fulfilled thanks to the Rafael Maya Public Departmental Library, to its rooms for people with disabilities, to her teacher, to the efforts of her grandparents, the corn and tomato harvests that provide a livelihood, to the efforts of a librarian who has advocated for programs for people with disabilities, the support of many good human beings… of many caring people that Yenny mentions and which she holds in her heart and memories.

“The people in this library and the library itself changed my girl´s life… She wouldn´t know everything she knows without this room, without these machines, without these books, without these computers, without these teachers and without the librarians”. So concludes Margarita Hormiga, Yenny´s grandmother, guardian of her dreams and smiles.

The Rafael Maya Departmental Public Library is part of the Project “Use and Appropriation of ICT in public libraries” of the Ministry of Culture of Colombia and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has developed new library services for all ages, and especially for children and adults, thanks to the new technologies and training this Project has provided the Library with.

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