A week before visiting the Dialogue in the Dark (DID), I was trying to guess how the place was designed and what kind of situation I will experience during the tour. I was also thinking about how the tour guide, who is a visually impaired, would be able to lead us through the whole tour. The reason why I felt this way is because on the streets, I often witness visually impaired people having to rely on passer-by to get to their destination. Thus it made me wonder how they would be able to lead and guide us in the darkness.

After the tour, I was surprised by how well the tour guide could move around in the dark. One moment he was behind us doing a head count and the next moment he was already ahead of us guiding us to the next place. I was really admirable of him because when I was even having difficulty walking straight, he could actually move around so easily as there was a role switch and that he was able to see and we were the blind ones.

Another thing that I experience from the tour is the feeling of being blind. Although it was just an hour long of blindness, it made me realise several things. For once I felt the importance of our sense of sight. Without it, we would not be able to witness the wonderful and beautiful things that exist in this world. All we could was to try and visualise it. Going to this tour has definitely taught me an important lesson that is to treasure what we have now and do not take things for granted.

Many will say that they have already experienced how it feels to be blind through games that require them to be blindfolded or have witnessed a blackout before. But after going through the tour, I will tell you that those experience is nothing compared to the DID tour. DID is designed in such a way that you would be able to go through daily life routine while being blind by the darkness. That is the only way we can observe and get first hand information about how much difficulty a visually impaired person faced in everyday life.

Through DID, BZSE and PCS students can get a better understanding of what a social enterprise is and how it operates. And with chances of being an interns at DID during our final year, it allows us to gain experience before going working in other social enterprises when we graduate or even start our own social enterprise in the future.

I feel that DID is a successful social enterprise as they are able to help the visually impaired by hiring them to work as tour guide so that they can earn an income. This is because visually impaired people hardly can get a normal job as they are unable to see. Thus I feel that the only thing BZSE student can do is to help expand DID business and getting more customer. We can do this by helping in the marketing sector of DID to come up with new promotions to help increase the number of customers.
Not only that, we can retain existing customers by maybe setting up another DID in Singapore, with different types of experience, maybe such as studying in class, learning how to get onto a bus and so on. Only with more customers, DID will be able to expand its business and increase the number of visually impaired they can hire.

Eugene T02