Mission to Bangkok

The Deputy Minister of Education for the government of Thailand was obviously perplexed by the American lady who had come all the way to Bangkok to start a school for the blind. "Madam," said he, "why are you doing such foolish work? There are no blind in Thailand." "But, Your Excellency," replied the lady, "there are 14 in my new school already." "Well," huffed the Minister, "why bother to educate them?" And with that, his excellency turned away.

In the 17 years since she settled in Bangkok, Virginia-born Genevieve Caulfield* has brought to Thailand's 11,000 blind hope that they might otherwise never have known. Blind herself, she was determined to break down Thailand's traditional indifference to the handicapped, eventually founded the first school for the blind that the country has ever had. Last week, 8,700 miles away, her story was retold at a special ceremony in Philadelphia. There, as part of the city's Education Week for the Blind, Genevieve Caulfield received in absentia a small, belated, but much deserved reward: a plaque for her "great contribution in the field of education of the sightless."

Destination: Asia. Genevieve Caulfield lost her sight in infancy, when a careless doctor dropped some searing medicine into her eyes. In childhood her mother urged her to play like other youngsters, explained to Genevieve's friends: "She can't see, but she can play as you do. Perhaps you might help her a little if there are holes in the ground." Later, after graduating from two different schools for the blind, Genevieve became fascinated by what she had heard about Asia, decided to learn Japanese and then take a degree at Columbia University's Teachers College. She taught English to Japanese businessmen in Manhattan, finally set out for Tokyo. There, while teaching at a boys' school, she first heard about the deplorable conditions in Thailand.

Armed with $800 raised during a quick visit to the U.S., she arrived in Bangkok in 1938 to find conditions even worse than she expected. To most of Thailand's Buddhist population, blindness was simply a punishment inflicted for some evil done in a previous life, and not even the government seemed to want to interfere. "This is really unnecessary work the late Prince Rajada Sonakul told her. "When we finish educating all the delinquent boys in Thailand, perhaps we can do something for the physically handicapped." Weary of official brushoffs. Miss Caulfield decided to take her case to the people. She set up a booth at Bangkok's big Constitutional Fair, for seven nights straight gave demonstrations in reading Braille. Though the people watched and listened, they did not believe. Some said she was a spy; most thought her reading was only a trick.

Into the Interior. Then, one day in 1939, her luck changed. The blind Princess Puangmas-Phaka Diskul. cousin of the future King Phumiphon, heard about her work, asked to be admitted to the school. Soon other pupils came, and by the time the war broke out. her school was so well established that the Japanese invaders were persuaded to let it continue. When the bombs began to fall on Bangkok she gathered her pupils together and moved the school into the interior. After V-J day she led her doughty band of students back to the capital and took up where she had left off.

Today Genevieve Caulfield's matronly figure is a famous one in Bangkok. Her school, built on land that the government gave her in 1949, has six buildings and a special Braille printing press from the Foreign Operations Administration. Taught by a staff of Roman Catholic Salesian sisters and Thai volunteers, her 189 pupils come from all over the land--the children of high government officials and poor shopkeepers, of rich merchants, pedicab drivers and coolies. Eventually, she hopes to build a new $50,000 building, a vocational training center in Bangkok, and an elementary school in northern Chiangmai. But even if those plans never go through, she will have accomplished her mission. "The whole attitude of the Thai people towards the physically handicapped," says she, "has changed entirely." Would she take the credit? "Please look at it this way: the school has helped a great deal."

*Aunt of Cinemactress Joan Caulfield.

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