Week 8, Pg86, Yooran Kim : Helen Keller

Helen Keller 200903992 Yooran Kim   What would you do if you had only three days left until you become blind? There was a woman who felt very sorry to hear from her friend that she had nothing left to remember especially after long hours of hiking. The woman could not neither watch nor hear. Her name was Helen Keller who was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degrees. Also, she was a prolific author who gave us an inspiration about human being as a phenom. Even though Helen Keller was very smart, she could not have done such a wonderful job without her instructor, Anne Sullivan who had lifelong (49 years) relationship with Helen. Anne Sullivan met Helen Keller when Hellen was seven years old. On the first day they met, Anne spelled 'd-o-l-l' with her tip of finger on Helen's palm while she was giving Helen a doll as a gift. Helen didn't understand at first because she didn't know every object have its own name. But in the next month, when Anne spelled 'w-a-t-e-r' on Helen's palm which was under running cold water, Helen came to realize the concept of 'water' and symbolize it into a word. Since then, Helen exhausted Anne asking the name of every object around her. Through this process, Helen got the insight and lots of knowledge to the world. This story people thought it impossible to happen made Helen Keller a world-famous speaker and author. She had her own political point of view and was a political activist which affected good to many poor people arount the world. She was a suffragist and pacifist as well as an advocate for people with disabilities. In 1915, Helen Keller founded the 'Helen Keller International (HKI) organization which researched vision, health, and nutrition. Also she helped to found the 'American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920. Helen traveled to over 39 countries with Anne, and met every U.S. president. She also was a good writer, too. She wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles. As an author, she gave a marvelous influence on AFB(American Foundation for the Blind) and people all around the world. To lots of disabled people, She became a role model and to other people, she taught all humans were noble and it is the problem of attitude not of physical state that preventing us from overcoming disability. Her courage that no ordinary one could ever show, made people's mind more widely opened and gave disabled people lots of possibilities and different approaches to disability. "If, by some miracle, I were granted three seeing days," Helen Keller wrote in her essay 'Three days to see,' that what she wished for to see. Those were all things that we think too natural such as seeing people around us and small simple things at home and seeing how night is transformed into day or going to museums and theatres. She said her mind would be so overcrowded with glorious memories that she should have little time for regrets, that she would return to darkness with gratitude and love in her mind. Even these days, her writing is making a big wave in people's mind. In 1999, Helen Keller was listed in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century. There are even streets named after Helen Keller in Getafe, Spain and Lod, Israel. I think these show us how big her influence was all over the world.