Read and grow rich!

Read and grow rich!  Sound a bit far fetched?  Well a true story to prove it’s possible.

A little girl was dealt a bad hand in life.  She was only a year old when she suffered a childhood illness which took away her sight and hearing.  She was trapped inside her mind.  She hadn’t leaned to speak.  She uttered grunts and animal sounds.  She went into fits of rage, smashing dishes and physically attacking anyone in the room with her.  More than one Doctor diagnosed her as mentally ill.  But her parents believed.

When she was seven, the family hired a young woman to tutor her.  For weeks the tutor tried to communicate with the girl by spelling words into her hand.  The little girl could feel the tutor’s fingers on her palm, but they didn’t have any meaning to her.  She was still trapped. 

Then one day a breakthrough came.  The little girl was holding a cup under a water spout.  The tutor kept spelling “w-a-t-e-r” into the girl’s hand.  Suddenly the girl understood that the letters represented an object!  The door to the world flew wide open to her!  She ran around grabbing everything she could, begging the tutor to spell the name of each object into her palm.  That day the little girl was no longer trapped inside her mind.  She was free.

The little girl grew to her full potential, and it was the technology of reading that enabled her to transform herself.  Once she understood the concept of reading and writing, she became a veracious learner.  (Remember, she’s blind and deaf!).  By the time she was 10 she was writing letters in French to famous people in Europe. 

She decided to go to University, and her dedicated tutor sat beside her spelling the words of lectures into her hand.  She graduated (the first deaf/blind person ever to graduate) with honours and went on the become a celebrated writer who was honoured by kings and presidents, and went on to publish 14 books. 

Just think – the little girl’s life began when she learned to read!  Her name by the way was Helen.  Helen Keller.  Ah yes, there is power in reading!  Let’s read and grow rich!