This is an article from Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind.
A U.S. Diplomat with an Extraordinary Global View
By Andrew Councill. Reprinted from The New York Times, copyright July 7, 2007
As chief of the political section at the American Embassy in Port of Spain,
Trinidad, for the last two years, Avraham Rabby has had the job of surveying
Trinidad's political landscape for Washington. The fact that he has not
actually seen the Caribbean island--or any of the places on five continents
where he has been posted--has not stymied him.
"I necessarily listen more than a sighted person would," he said. "If I'm
walking along a street, I can tell there is a building next to me because of
the echoes of my feet or my cane. A blind person sees the world differently
from a sighted person. Our impressions are no less valid."
Mr. Rabby, who lost his sight at the age of eight because of detached
retinas, is the State Department's first blind diplomat. It is an achievement
he fought for in the 1980's, passing three written entrance exams and two oral
exercises along the way. But even then, the State Department barred him from
the diplomatic corps.
"You don't ask a blind person to drive a bus or be a bank teller," George
S. Vest, who was the personnel director for the Foreign Service, explained in a
1988 interview. "There are jobs which are dangerous or unsuitable for them.
And in the Foreign Service, we're full of jobs like that."
The department contended that diplomats, blind ones included, had to be
able to work anywhere in the world and to work with confidential documents
without any outside aid. In addition, State Department officials said,
diplomats had to be able to pick up on nonverbal cues, such as winks or nods,
which can sometimes have more meaning than the words being uttered.
But Mr. Rabby illustrated another essential quality of diplomats:
perseverance. "No international treaty has ever been decided on the basis of a
wink or a nod," he retorted, after hiring a lawyer and challenging the State
Department's policy, which dated from the 18th century.
Aiding Mr. Rabby's effort was a federal law barring the government from
disqualifying prospective employees because of disabilities. Eventually, after
the news media and Congress found out about his case, the State Department
reversed course. The new policy would consider disabled diplomats on a
case-by-case basis. Mr. Rabby became case number one.
In 1990, he was off to London, where he was posted at the embassy there as
a junior political officer. He moved next to Pretoria, South Africa, where
Nelson Mandela had just been freed from prison and where Mr. Rabby witnessed
the country's first free elections. "It was one of the most stimulating
experiences in my life," he said, noting that he was one of the embassy's
election observers.
"People ask me how I can assess a political rally if I can't see it," he
said. "I tell them that I listen to the crowd and to the speakers. You can
sense what is going on."
He spent time in Washington at the State Department's Bureau of Human
Rights, and in postings in Lima and New Delhi. During a stint at the United
States Mission to the United Nations, he helped write resolutions dealing with
literacy, global health and the rights of the disabled.
His final posting--he retired at the end of June at the mandatory
retirement age of 65-- was to Port of Spain, where he became an expert in
Trinidad's political system, which has long been divided between parties, one
predominantly Afro-Trinidadian and one Indo-Trinidadian.
When journalists descended on Trinidad earlier this year in search of
information on a plot to bomb Kennedy International Airport, he became one of
the officials to talk to.
"A diplomat does a lot of writing, a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, a
lot of talking, and has to attend a lot of meetings," he said. Thanks to
technological advances and a full-time assistant, Mr. Rabby could do all of
those things too. He wrote his cables to Washington using a machine that wrote
in braille. He then read them back to his assistant, Rhonda Singh, who typed
them up. He also had a computer with a speech program that allowed him to
listen to his e-mail messages.
As for tracking news developments, Ms. Singh, an American citizen who
lives in Trinidad, read him the local papers. "I was basically his eyes," she
said.
Born in Israel, Mr. Rabby, who is known as Rami, was sent to live with an
aunt in England at the age of 10 because his parents believed there were better
schools for blind children there. A Hebrew speaker, he quickly mastered
English at Worcester College for Blind Boys.
"I remember the headmaster used to go out and speak to groups about the
school, and he used to say that we teach our boys to stand on their own two
feet and, if necessary, to step on yours too," Mr. Rabby recalled.
He went off to Oxford, where he studied French and Spanish. Finding a job
after college proved a challenge. "Time and time again I met recruiters who
felt that a blind person could not work in management," he said in the British
accent that he has never lost. Eventually, he joined Ford Motor Company in
Britain, where he worked in human resources. After about a year, he moved to
the United States and earned an MBA at the University of Chicago.
After graduation in 1969, he sought out a management training program, but
had few offers after "dozens and dozens, if not hundreds" of interviews.
He finally landed a job with a management consulting firm, Hewitt
Associates, and later moved to Citibank. He also spent time as an independent
consultant, writing a number of employment guides, including one giving advice
to blind job seekers.
"One of my problems in my working life, after a few years I get a bit
tired of what I am doing and I want to change," said Mr. Rabby, who became an
American citizen in 1980.
It was while living in New York that he decided to make the jump into
international relations, a longtime interest. The State Department's regular
rotations of its diplomats proved a perfect fit.
His fight to join the Foreign Service has helped others along the way.
There are now four blind Foreign Service officers stationed around the globe,
the State Department said, among about 170 disabled Foreign Service employees
overseas.
Mr. Rabby said blind Foreign Service officers had recently been restricted
from adjudicating visa applications because of their inability to verify
photographs and signatures of applications.
Mr. Rabby, who attributes the decision to the increased restrictions after
the Sept. 11 attacks, said he did visa work at the start of his career in
London, with the assistance of a reader, who verified documents for him. He
asked the questions and assessed the responses. "The State Department is not
yet completely on the side of the angels," he said. A State Department
official disputed that there was a policy in place restricting the assignments
of blind diplomats. Decisions on assigning personnel, the official said, are
made on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the law.
Even before Mr. Rabby headed out into the world as a diplomat, he was
already testifying before Congress on his quest for the job. He said back then
that he did not want to be put in a pigeonhole as a blind diplomat.
"Blind people are as different from one another as sighted people," he
told members of the House Foreign Affairs and Civil Service Committees in 1989.
"There is no such thing as a category labeled `blind.'"
[Editor's Note: We congratulate Mr. Rabby, who has been a reader of the
Ziegler Magazine.]
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