The education of blind students in Ethiopia is in no way comparable to that in the Netherlands. Teachers are not trained to help these young people, no Braille is taught, there are no facilities such as books in Braille, let alone digital information.
The education of the blind in Lalibela has been a main focus of our foundation for fifteen years. The first fruits of this are now being reaped. This summer our first two blind students graduated from university, as you can read above.
In August of this year, our volunteer and educational expert Teshome Asefa from Addis went on a working visit to Lalibela for us. There he met our eight university students and provided them with advice for the coming academic year. He also talked to the schools and the Blind Association to discuss how the guidance of blind students in the local schools can be better facilitated.

We are very proud of our students Tarik Keffie Wosson (pictured) and Meseret Awoke Wubbet for having obtained their university degree in Sociology. They are not the first graduates from our Social Project, but the first blind students. Of course we sincerely hope that they will soon find a paid job.

This academic year no fewer than four blind students have moved on from secondary school to various university programmes. Thanks to our donors and a few donations, we were able to provide all of them with a laptop. As a result, they no longer have to pay fellow students to read their books.
At a later stage, the board will decide whether the other blind students are also eligible for a laptop. For this we will be looking for sponsors in the coming period. Would you like to contribute to this? You know where to find us!

With these four new students we now have ten blind students in our study project.
One of them – Habtamu Melese – deserves a special mention here. In addition to his Law studies, he has written and published a dictionary. Commonly used technical terms in Amharic are now available in English and vice versa.