[nfb-talk] Rami Rabbi

[Ed Meskys]

This article appeared in the New York Times a month or two back. I do not
have the actual clipping handy but will get it back tomorrow, which has the
date pencilled in. Barbara Pierce, I will send you the actual clipping in
case you want to use it in the Monitor.

For NH readers...Rami Rabbi had been very active in the National NFB for
many years while he struggled to gain acceptance from the State Department.
He was the US's first blind diplomat, and now there are several. He was
close friends with the late Franklin           van Vliet of NH, and had
often visited the state, chapter meetings, and state conventions.

Ed Meskys

==


AS chief of the political section at the American Embassy here for the last
two years, Avraham Rabby has had the job of surveying Trinidad's political
landscape
for Washington.

The fact that he has not actually seen the Caribbean island - or any of the
places on five continents where he has been posted - has not stymied him.

"I necessarily listen more than a sighted person would," he said. "If I'm
walking along a street, I can tell there is a building next to me because of
the
echoes of my feet or my cane. A blind person sees the world differently from
a sighted person. Our impressions are no less valid."

Mr. Rabby, who lost his sight at the age of 8 because of detached retinas,
is the State Department's first blind diplomat. It is an achievement he
fought
for in the 1980s, passing three written entrance exams and two oral
exercises along the way. But even then, the State Department barred him from
the diplomatic
corps.

"You don't ask a blind person to drive a bus or be a bank teller," George S.
Vest, who was the personnel director for the Foreign Service, explained in
a 1988 interview. "There are jobs which are dangerous or unsuitable for
them. And in the Foreign Service, we're full of jobs like that."

The department contended that diplomats, blind ones included, had to be able
to work anywhere in the world and to work with confidential documents
without
any outside aid. In addition, State Department officials said, diplomats had
to be able to pick up on nonverbal cues, such as winks or nods, which can
sometimes have more meaning than the words being uttered.

But Mr. Rabby illustrated another essential quality of diplomats:
perseverance. "No international treaty has ever been decided on the basis of
a wink or
a nod," he retorted, after hiring a lawyer and challenging the State
Department's policy, which dated from the 18th century.

Aiding Mr. Rabby's effort was a federal law barring the government from
disqualifying prospective employees because of disabilities. Eventually,
after the
news media and Congress found out about his case, the State Department
reversed course. The new policy would consider disabled diplomats on a
case-by-case
basis. Mr. Rabby became case No. 1.

In 1990, he was off to London, where he was posted at the embassy there as a
junior political officer. He moved next to Pretoria, South Africa, where
Nelson Mandela
had just been freed from prison and where Mr. Rabby witnessed the country's
first free elections. "It was one of the most stimulating experiences in my
life," he said, noting that he was one of the embassy's election observers.

"People ask me how I can assess a political rally if I can't see it," he
said. "I tell them that I listen to the crowd and to the speakers. You can
sense
what is going on."

He spent time in Washington at the State Department's Bureau of Human
Rights, and in postings in Lima and New Delhi. During a stint at the United
States
Mission to the
United Nations,
he helped write resolutions dealing with literacy, global health and the
rights of the disabled.

His final posting - he retired at the end of June at the mandatory
retirement age of 65 - was to Port of Spain, where he became an expert in
Trinidad's
political system, which has long been divided between parties, one
predominantly Afro-Trinidadian and one Indo-Trinidadian.

When journalists descended on Trinidad recently in search of information on
the suspected plot to set off a bomb at a fuel line at Kennedy International
Airport that was traced back to this Caribbean island, he became one of the
officials to talk to.

"A diplomat does a lot of writing, a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, a
lot of talking and has to attend a lot of meetings," he said. Thanks to
technological
advances and a full-time assistant, Mr. Rabby could do all of those things
too.

He wrote his cables to Washington using a machine that wrote in Braille. He
then read them back to his assistant, Rhonda Singh, who typed them up. He
also
had a computer with a speech program that allowed him to listen to his
e-mail messages.

As for tracking news developments, Ms. Singh, an American citizen who lives
in Trinidad, read him the local papers. "I was basically his eyes," she
said.

BORN in Israel, Mr. Rabby, who is known as Rami, was sent to live with an
aunt in England at the age of 10 because his parents believed there were
better
schools for the blind there. A Hebrew speaker, he quickly mastered English
at Worcester College for Blind Boys.

"I remember the headmaster used to go out and speak to groups about the
school, and he used to say that we teach our boys to stand on their own two
feet
and, if necessary, to step on yours too," Mr. Rabby recalled.

He went off to Oxford, where he studied French and Spanish. Finding a job
after college proved a challenge. "Time and time again I met recruiters who
felt
that a blind person could not work in management," he said in the British
accent that he has never lost.

Eventually, he joined Ford Motor Company in Britain, where he worked in
human resources. After about a year, he moved to the United States and
earned an
M.B.A. at the
University of Chicago.

After graduation in 1969, he sought out a management training program, but
had few offers after "dozens and dozens, if not hundreds" of interviews.

He finally landed a job with a management consulting firm, Hewitt
Associates, and later moved to Citibank. He also spent time as an
independent consultant,
writing a number of employment guides, including one giving advice to blind
job seekers.

"One of my problems in my working life, after a few years I get a bit tired
of what I am doing and I want to change," said Mr. Rabby, who became an
American
citizen in 1980.

It was while living in New York that he decided to make the jump into
international relations, a longtime interest. The State Department's regular
rotations
of its diplomats proved a perfect fit.

His fight to join the Foreign Service has helped others along the way. There
are now four blind Foreign Service officers stationed around the globe, the
State Department said, among about 170 disabled Foreign Service employees
overseas.

MR. RABBY said blind Foreign Service officers had recently been restricted
from adjudicating visa applications because of their inability to verify
photographs
and signatures of applications.

Mr. Rabby, who attributes the decision to the increased restrictions after
the Sept. 11 attacks, said he did visa work at the start of his career in
London,
with the assistance of a reader, who verified documents for him. He asked
the questions and assessed the responses.

"The State Department is not yet completely on the side of the angels," he
said. A State Department official disputed that there was a policy in place
restricting
the assignments of blind diplomats. Decisions on assigning personnel, the
official said, are made on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the law.

Even before Mr. Rabby headed out into the world as a diplomat, he was
already testifying before Congress on his quest for the job. He said back
then that
he did not want to be put in a pigeonhole as a blind diplomat.

"Blind people are as different from one another as sighted people," he told
members of the House Foreign Affairs and Civil Service Committees in 1989.
"There
is no such thing as a category labeled, 'blind.' "



I found the article on the New York Times website.  Here is the link
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/washington/07rabby.html.