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Amazing Woman:
Amazing Woman:
Helen Keller
Helen Keller

Warm-Upm-Up
War
Helen Adams Keller is known around the world as a symbol of courage in the face of terrible
odds. Blind, deaf, and mute from a very early age, few people believed that such a person
would ever achieve anything significant in life. However, Helen proved them wrong by not only
learning to read and write, but graduating from college, writing books, and bringing about a
change in the world. Helen travelled the world making speeches. She met many famous people
of her time and was respected and admired by presidents, prime ministers, actors, and writers
and received several honours. She also starred in a documentary for which she won an Oscar.

Helen Adams Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama in the USA, on June 27 1880. She was not born
blind and deaf. In fact, she was a normal healthy child and could say a few words even before she
was two years old.

It was not until she was 19 months old that she fell ill. Her ailment was described
by the doctors as “an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain” which
many doctors believe was meningitis. The illness left her deaf and blind.
Trapped in a dark soundless world, she was lonely and unable to make

her needs and desires known. Life became traumatic for her as well as
her family, as they knew of no way to reach through her disabilities
and to communicate with her.

Slowly, she began to feel people’s hands to try to find out what
they were doing. By and by, she learned to do many things on her
own. She could recognise people by feeling their faces or their
clothes and made up signs with her hands so she could “talk” to
her family.

She devised a way to communicate partially with Martha, the
six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her
signs. And, by the age of seven, she had over 60 different signs to
communicate. If she wanted bread, she pretended to be cutting a loaf. If she wanted ice cream, she
would hug her shoulders and shiver. Though now she was able to establish some communication
with her family, yet Helen was very much frustrated because she couldn’t express many of her
thoughts. This made her very angry and she threw temper tantrums and often became very unruly.

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