“SAAVI taught me that not only can I learn these skills, but SAAVI taught me how to be confident, how to be proud of who I am,”
Sirena Carroll recites familiar lines to any fan of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
“And Professor Dumbledore got to his feet again,” said Carroll, a student at SAAVI Services for the Blind. “The hall fell silent.”
Carroll is reading Harry Potter, of course, but it’s in Braille.
Each Harry Potter book takes up 10 or more Braille volumes. You’ll often find Sirena in SAAVI’s Braille library.
“Bring your right hand to meet it,” Sirena said, showing how she reads her novels. “That’s how I do it.”
As a student at SAAVI, Sirena says she unlocked confidence she didn’t know she had.
“It allowed me to walk out of SAAVI, knowing that I had a disability, but the disability did not have me,” she said.
As a single mom, Sirena admits that before coming to SAAVI, she was anxious about doing things like cooking and navigating.
“SAAVI taught me that not only can I learn these skills, but SAAVI taught me how to be confident, how to be proud of who I am,” she said. “That blindness was not a curse.”
SAAVI emphasizes training in non-visual skills.
Sirena says she’s now able to navigate trips to Germany to visit her daughter.
Now, the student has become the teacher.
“After I learned so much from them, I decided that I would love to work here, and I was blessed that they gave me the opportunity,” she said.
Sirena now teaches Braille at SAAVI.
“I work with the seniors, the Silver Canes,” she said. “I’m teaching them Braille. That is amazingly rewarding because they’re all so eager to learn.”
Sirena is a true SAAVI success story.
“Because I have the confidence that I need to hold my head up high and say, ‘Yes, I am blind, but that does not mean that I’m incapable.”
SAAVI counts on donations to help make these programs possible.
If you’d like to show your support, you can donate directly through its website.
Our partners in The Giving Project, The Community Foundation of Southern Arizona, will again match the first $500 in donations.
