Tenberken, Sabriye 1970-

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TENBERKEN, Sabriye 1970-

PERSONAL:

Born 1970, near Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany (now Germany); father a pianist, mother a children's theater director mother. Education: Bonn University, degree (Tibetology).

ADDRESSES:

Office—Braille ohne Grenzen e.V., Förderkreis Blinden-Zentrum Tibet e.V., Im Auel 34, D-53913 Swisttal-Morenhoven, Germany. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Arcade Publishing, 141 Fifth Ave., 8th Fl., New York, NY 10010. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Braille without Borders, Swisttal-Morenhoven, Germany, cofounder and director, 1998—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Norgall Prize, International Women's Club, 2000; Charity Bambi, Burda (Germany), 2000; Zilveren Jandaia (with Paul Kronenberg), Stichting kerk en Wereld (Holland), 2001; named Global Leader of Tomorrow, World Economic Forum, 2001; Albert Schweizer Award (with Kronenberg), Wolfgang von Goethe Association, 2002; named knight, Order of Oranje Nassau (Netherlands), 2003; Christopher Award, 2004, for My Path Leads to Tibet: The Inspiring Story of How One Young Blind Woman Brought Hope to the Blind Children of Tibet; European Hero and Asian Hero awards, Time magazine, both 2004; Leila Hadley Luce Award for Courage.

WRITINGS:

My Path Leads to Tibet: The Inspiring Story of How One Young Blind Woman Brought Hope to the Blind Children of Tibet (originally published as Mein Weg führt nach Tibet), Arcade Publishing (New York, NY), 2003.

My Path Leads to Tibet has been translated into French, Italian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sabriye Tenberken first became fascinated by Tibet when she was a girl touring a museum exhibit with her fellow students. At the time, she was already going blind from a degenerative retina disease that left her sightless by the age of thirteen. Despite this setback, Tenberken determined to attend Bonn University, where she graduated with a degree in Tibetology. After graduation, she interviewed for several positions, but no one would hire her because of her handicap. Undeterred, she resolved to travel to Tibet in 1994. While altitude sickness forced her to return home that first time, it would not be her last trip; she had a personal mission to establish a school for the blind in Tibet and had, while a university student, created the first Tibetan Braille system when she discovered that one had not yet been invented. The story of how she eventually succeeded in her task to found a school for the blind in Tibet is told by Tenberken in her autobiography, My Path Leads to Tibet: The Inspiring Story of How One Young Blind Woman Brought Hope to the Blind Children of Tibet.

In 1998, along with her colleague and partner Paul Kronenberg, Tenberken returned to Tibet for good and, after wading through reams of bureaucratic paperwork and fighting local cultural prejudices against blind people, successfully founded Braille without Borders' first school in the capital city of Lhasa. Because of its high altitude, Tibetans suffer from an unusually high rate of blindness: one in seventy people there will lose their sight, which is twice the world's average percentage. This is not the only problem in Tibet that Tenberken and Kronenberg faced, however. People in Tibet believe that blindness is a form of divine punishment for some evil the afflicted have committed; in addition, many Tibetans do not know how to deal with their blind children. For example, Tenberken found children locked up in darkened closets or tied to their beds because their parents felt this would keep them from injuring themselves.

My Path Leads to Tibet reveals the obstacles and triumphs Tenberken faced while establishing her school, which teaches children how to read Braille in several languages, instructs them in other academic skills, and teaches the day-to-day skills that enable students to live more independently. This program gives students an enormous boost in self-esteem. The profits from Tenberken's book have gone directly to her school, and she is now seeking to establish similar schools for the blind in other Asian countries.

"Tenberken is an appealing narrator," according to Curtis Sittenfeld in a Washington Post Book World review of My Path Leads to Tibet, the critic adding that the author "com[es] … across as straightforward, sensible and optimistic." Although Sittenfeld added that the book is inelegantly written, he added that "the story it tells is genuinely inspiring." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the autobiography "impressive, moving, and refreshingly free of sentimentality and self-pity," while a Publishers Weekly critic concluded: "Readers looking for a good travel yarn or an old-fashioned story of bravery conquering all obstacles … will love Tenberken's saga."

The winner of numerous awards and honors for her work in Tibet, including the 2002 Albert Schweizer Award, Tenberken also appears in a documentary film made about her life titled Climb Higher.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Tenberken, Sabriye, My Path Leads to Tibet: The Inspiring Story of How One Young Blind Woman Brought Hope to the Blind Children of Tibet, Arcade Publishing (New York, NY), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2002, review of My Path Leads to Tibet: The Inspiring Story of How One Young Blind Woman Brought Hope to the Blind Children of Tibet, p. 1603.

New York Times, September 20, 2003, Jim Yardley, A German Voyager's Bold Vision for Tibet's Blind, p. A4; October 31, 2004, Kimi Puntillo, Blind Mountain Climbers Challenge Prejudice, and Reach for the Sky, section 8, p. 8.

Publishers Weekly, November 11, 2002, review of My Path Leads to Tibet, p. 48.

School Library Journal, May, 2003, Judy McAloon, review of My Path Leads to Tibet, p. 181.

Time International (Asian edition), October 11, 2004, Chaim Estulin, "Blind, Yet a Visionary," p. 50.

Time International (European edition), October 11, 2004, Ursula Sautter, "The Visionary: Sabriye Tenberken/Germany No Limits: Blind since Twelve, She Wrote a Tibetan Braille, then Moved There to Teach It," p. 58.

Washington Post Book World, February 9, 2003, Curtis Sittenfeld, review of My Path Leads to Tibet, p. 9.