<-- back to the
parable of the car
This is the beginning of the archive of the words
of the late Leah Francis.
I'll begin with a few profound things I've thought or
discovered about her life:
In the last few years, she was getting the ABC
news
email. And for the first time in her life, she knew how to
spell words like Al Queda, and Hussein, and Baghdad.
For her whole life she relied very successfully on the radio for the
news of the world, but the radio doesn't spell the words for
you. She had travelled the world by word of mouth, taking
notes about people and places, but usually only able to guess how they
were spelt.
She wasn't very good at maths. I think she could have been,
but blind girls didn't get taught maths in 1950, and braille maths is
complicated, so she never really learnt. I remember when I
was about 15, explaining to her that 22 divided by 7 was only an
approximation to pi. She was surprised, and I think very
disappointed. When you don't have much, you hold tight to
what you have.