IN A QUEST FOR ‘WHAT THEY VALUE THE MOST’: PERSONS WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENT AND BLINDNESS IN A CLUSTERED COMMUNITY IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

The community engagement and the resource requirements of a community would vary on the nature of the community. If one would broadly recognize persons with visual impairment and blindness (VI&B) as community per se, it is expected that their needs, resource requirements and the activities they engagedin would differ from the rest of the population in general. This research aims to explore the nature of resource requirements and the activities commonly engaged-in by a ‘community’ of persons with VI&B, in a ‘clustered village’ in Southern Sri Lanka. Though sociologists interpret the term community in various ways, this study adopts the definition of Sylvia Dale, (1990); “Community is a body of people living in the same locality…Alternatively, a sense of identity and belonging shared among people living in the same locality, Also, the set of social relations found in a particular bounded area” (Dale, 1990, p. 562). Accordingly, the ‘Siyanethugama’ 55th model village was developed by the National Housing Authority in 2018, where 27 families having at least one person in each with VI&B, would very well be embraced as a “community”. Each family is allocated a 10 perch land with a basic one-bedroom house. Visual impairment or vision impairment, is the degree of reduced vision level from low vision to total blindness that impedes a person’s ability to function at certain or many tasks. As at 2018, among the Sri Lankan population of 21 million (worldometer, 2020), considerably 1.7% of individuals carry a visual impairment (Devapriya, 2020). A study is yet be performed in the Sri Lankan context based on the theme “Resources and activities that VI&B people value the most in their lives”. The preference of an individual’s resources and activities may vary according to their demographic characteristics. This empirical study focuses on deriving what types of resources and activities the VI&B people ascertain the most in their lives, and how the demographic characteristics affect their lives based on their visual impairment type. This study contributes to draw attention from the government towards the VI&B people and types of actions the government can take, to improve the lifestyle of VI&B people in Sri Lanka.