Blind Pinoys read Pasyon in braille

LEGAZPI CITY – Their fingers slide over the tiny dots that protrude from the pages of a book as they sing the story of the birth, suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

Elinor Junio, Jeffrey Cuella, Enrique Balinqui, Dande Revale, Joseph Rico, Teddy Ponferada and Joan Lorica are the first blind Filipinos to sing the “Pasyong Mahal” after the book about Christ’s passion was translated into braille.

They sang for 24 hours straight starting in the afternoon of Holy Monday up to Holy Tuesday inside the Sacred Heart Chapel of the Bicol Small Business Institute (BSBI) building inside the Bicol University campus here.

“Tears just flow as I now could imagine the sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ who died just to save us from our sins,” said 23-year-old Cuella of Tiwi, Albay.

Junio said she reads the passion to change something in herself.

Baliqui, 22, whose fingers were deformed at birth, said that he wants to say sorry for the hurt he did to others.

But Revale said that he prays so that the Lord would forgive the sins of the world and restore the sight of all his blind friends.

Before the translation of the Pasyong Bayan into Braille, blind Filipinos just listened to the reading held during Holy Week.

Bicolanos sing the 230 pages of the “Kasaysayan an Mahal na Pasion ni Jesucristo Cagurangnanta” by Fr. Francisco Gainza during Holy Week.

Ponferada, a married man with three children from Purok 2, said the idea to translate the passion of Christ to Braille came to him three years ago.

He said that he has been receiving Braille magazines from Malaysian friends who have invited Filipinos to join international Braille reading competitions.

“I was challenged after that to host a Braille reading contest using Catholic reading material,” said Ponferada, 50.

“We did not have any Catholic reading materials. We were swamped with Protestant reading materials like Born Again and King James Version of the Bible.”

“If other countries can hold a reading contest in Braille, I can also organize a contest among the blind in Albay to read the Pasyon for 24 hours,” he added.

Ponferada had expressed gratitude to the BSBI and Lea Velvar, head of the Braille department of the National Library, for sponsoring the first Braille translation of the Pasyong Mahal.

Velvar, a high school classmate of Ponferada at the Philippine National School for the Blind, started the project last February and completed it in March.

The 239-page two-column Pasyong Mahal was translated from the original Latin written by Fr. Amador Cruz to a reformatted one-column Braille translation. The finished product is 474 pages.

Ponferada, who studied Philosophy at the University of Santo Tomas from 1975 to 1980 but was unable to finish his thesis, said the Braille version of the Pasyon was reproduced into ten sets of spiral-bound copies consisting of 8 volumes.

He said Legazpi City Mayor Noel Rosal, one of his massage clients, donated P10,000 for the project.

The first reading of the Braille version of the Pasyon was conducted at the Sacred Heart chapel at the BSBI under Dr. Ofelia Segovia Vega.

The aim of the institute is to help persons with disabilities gain confidence and develop themselves. The training institute has been based at the Bicol University campus since 1988.

“We are social development workers,” Vega said. “We believe that a Filipino becomes productive by his own determination. Programs to alleviate the poor hardly trickle down to the poorest who are struggling to eke out a living in the barangays,” said Vega.

Vega believes that “self-empowerment must be his decision because one can only develop a person up to the extent of his desire for his own development.”

Vega thanked the financial support extended by the Angelo King Foundation and the Salome Tan Foundation for the repairs on the BSBI building that was damaged by super typhoon Reming that devastated Albay in 2006.

She said another program of the institute is to train blind people to become masseurs while the deaf-mute are given lessons in hair science.

The institute provides an 18-day basic massage course.

She said Filipinos were the only ones who translated the passion of Jesus Christ into Braille.

“I am sure that this is the only one of its kind in the whole world because the reading of the passion of Christ is done only in the Philippines,” Vega said.

Vega said that the singing of the Pasyon is one of the most beautiful religious innovations in the country.

Although the singing of the Pasyon is a dying tradition, Vega said that it will soon be translated into Bicolano.

Mayor Rosal said another reading of the Braille version of the Pasyon will be conducted today until Good Friday at the summit of Lignon Hill near the Legazpi City Airport “so this could be accessible to the public and the tourists as well.”  — With Cet Dematera