Sometimes, it doesn’t take a village,… it just takes one person

“By nature she was a conceiver, a trail-blazer, a pilgrim of life’s wholeness. So day by day, month after month, year in and year out, she labored to provide me with a diction and a voice sufficient for my service to the blind.” —Helen Keller, writing about Anne Sullivan (1866-1936)

Anne Sullivan lost her mother at 7, her beloved brother at 10 and her father simply deserted them sending Anne and her brother to a home. She was blind from a bacteria that went untreated. She begged to attend the school for the blind, to be educated.

At the age of 29, “Michael Anagnos, Director of the Perkins School for the Blind, asked his star pupil, Anne, if she was interested in working for the Keller family in Tuscumbia, Alabama. He told her that their six-year-old daughter, Helen Keller
, had been deaf and blind since the age of 19 months because of a severe illness.Since that time the baby had grown into a wild and increasingly uncontrollable child. The parents, Kate and Arthur Keller, had contacted the famous inventor and educator of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, D.C. for help. He, in turn, had put them in touch with the Perkins School for the Blind.” And the rest, of course is history. Anne Sullivan, though born in poverty, and lost her family at 10, she persevered and touched more lives than she every could have expected. She gave Helen a world to see.

source: American Foundation for the Blind