VOICES · 19 MAY 2026
Why We Are Blind Exists
I knew a blind massage therapist in Kuala Lumpur. His name is Keat Mun.
I say is because I do not know for certain. The last few times I called, the messages went unread. That could mean many things. It might mean nothing. But it is the kind of silence that makes you reach back into what you intended to do, and ask what is still there.
A few years ago I tried to build a website for him. Not for him exactly — for the world of blind massage therapists in this city, the men and women who fold themselves into small rooms above five-foot-ways and behind plastic curtains, listening for the timbre of a stranger’s voice to know who has walked in. The plan was modest. A platform that would let them be found. A page each, with their location, their training, their rates, their hands.
Keat Mun was not enthusiastic. He had survived without a website for decades. He had clients. He was, in the precise and patient way of a man who has built a life from touch and memory, not interested in modernising. I tried for a while. Then I stopped.
The domain stayed. The plan stayed. Years passed.
Last week, two days from expiry, the registrar’s email arrived. These are the very last days to renew weareblind.org. I almost let it go. The project was inactive. The man at the centre of it had stopped answering. The strategic move was to release the asset and prune.
I renewed it.
Not because I have a plan. I do not have a plan. I renewed it because there is something I cannot stop thinking about, and the absence of a plan has never been a good reason to forget a thing.
In Malaysia, 86.3% of blindness is avoidable — preventable or treatable. Most of it is cataract. The next largest cause is diabetes.
Here is what I cannot stop thinking about.
In Malaysia, 86.3% of blindness is avoidable — preventable or treatable. The number comes from the National Eye Survey II, the country’s last full audit of who can see, conducted in 2014 and published in 2018. Most of the avoidable blindness is cataract. The next largest cause is diabetic retinopathy — the slow blinding of an eye whose owner has lived with diabetes for too long without screening. Every uncle who skips his annual eye check, every clinic without a fundus camera, every public hospital with a waiting list longer than the disease, is a person walking toward darkness on a road that did not have to lead there.
I cannot stop thinking about the 63,524 Malaysians registered with the Department of Social Welfare as having a visual disability, and the much larger number who have not registered because the OKU card that is supposed to help them carries a stigma that closes more doors than it opens.
I cannot stop thinking about Abby, who graduated from UiTM with a degree in Human Resources, and who sells tissues on the streets of Kuala Lumpur because no employer would hire her.
I cannot stop thinking about the touchscreen ATMs that replaced the Braille keypads, the train platforms without tactile numbering, the election commission website that will not read aloud, the Braille reference books that arrive in the second half of the semester.
And I cannot stop thinking about Keat Mun, who is somewhere in this city or somewhere else, who may be working or may be gone, who would not have wanted a website but would, I think, have wanted to be heard.
So this is what We Are Blind is, beginning now.
It is not a platform. It is not a charity. It is a place where the blind in Malaysia get their voices on a public record — through interviews, through their words, through the things they want the rest of us to know. It is a place where the gaps between policy and life get described in detail, until they are too obvious to keep ignoring. It is a place where the medical pipeline that leads ordinary people into preventable blindness gets explained in plain language, until the next uncle goes for his screening.
It is, mostly, a place where one of the largest invisible populations in this country becomes visible.
I am not the right person to lead this. The right people are the blind themselves, the NGOs who have been doing this work since 1951, the doctors who screen the diabetic uncle every year, the teachers who chase the Braille textbooks every semester. I am a writer with a renewed domain and a debt I am not sure how to repay.
What I can do is point. Pay attention. Write what is true. Bring readers into rooms they have never entered. Hand the microphone to people who have been near it for a long time without being asked to speak.
If Keat Mun reads this someday — and I hope he does — I want him to know the website was never the point. He was. And the others like him, who I have not met yet, but who I am going to meet.
This is why we are here.
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Filed under: Voices · Sources pointed: MAB, NCBM, SBM · Next: The 1% promise, 15 years on