VietNamNet Bridge – Dinh Viet Anh started to go blind at the age of three. But at 29, her impressive achievements have left those around her feeling anything but pity. Her scholastic progress and her accomplished working life have filled people with admiration for both her energy and commitment to success.

Teacher Dinh Viet Anh (standing) teaches information technology to a class of visually impaired students.

Anh was born a healthy child in a small house by the Ngan Pho River in the central province of Ha Tinh, but her eyes soon failed after she developed a degenerative disease of the cornea. Her blindness, however, did not affect her desire to learn and succeed, and her father proudly applied for her to enroll at school.

By the time Anh reached the fifth grade, she was completely blind in one eye, and all efforts to preserve her sight met with few positive results. At 17, neither eye could process light.

Hopeless, Anh considered dropping out of school, but her desire to learn stopped her. Her parents then became her eyes and though she struggled, she did not give up.

Persevering, Anh ranked among the top students in all twelve years of school. She also had a perfect attendance record and won a series of prestigious awards for academic excellence.

Her difficulties were not nearly over, however. Anh’s hopes for college looked bleak as universities were not able to accommodate blind students at that time.

"Those were very hard days for me," Anh recounted, "However, I still wrote down all of my thoughts. I believed that I would need them in the future and that I would continue learning."

A little light in her life

Before abandoning hopes for college, Anh discovered Braille and was introduced by the Provincial Association for the Blind to a course at the Ha Noi Training and Rehabilitation Centre for the Blind.

Anh excelled in the course and went on to work at the centre as a teacher. She then passed the entrance exams to become part of the Social Management programme at Ha Noi University’s Department of Social Science and Humanities in 1999 and the Department of English at Ha Noi Open University in 2002.

While working at the centre and studying at two universities, Anh continued to rank at the top of her class. She was selected to be one of five blind people from the Asia-Pacific region to attend an IT training course in Japan in 2004. She also attended a training course on multimedia digital book production for the disabled held in Thailand last year.

Anh was admitted to the Viet Nam Communist Party in July 2005 and was one of the representatives to be praised at the seventh National Emulation Congress held in October that year.

"I want to use English to approach IT and communicate with foreigners - to use it as a bridge between international organisations and blind Vietnamese people in order to bring about learning and development opportunities for ourselves," said Anh.

Currently, Anh is compiling and editing IT curricula for the blind to help them communicate more easily and effectively across the world. Her work and her life serve as living proof that a strong will and persistence can help an individual overcome even the most daunting of obstacles.

(Source: Viet Nam News)