Moving the needle in the dark
Rozalia I. Ukraine, Kharkiv. 2015
It was 10 years ago. Kharkiv back then was just a city in Ukraine that never made headline news. I traveled there with a JDC mission to meet people and film their stories. We were knocking on doors, and every time I’d enter someone’s home, I felt like an astronaut stepping into open space. I had a whole galaxy to explore in front of me—contained in a tiny apartment that hadn’t seen renovation since the 1970s, or in a private house full of old photographs, or in a shabby hut, like then, in Kharkiv. Rosalia opened the door.
She invited us in with warmth. Her home was worn, but filled with life. It was very dark inside, but a strong beam of evening sunlight confidently made it through the opening in the curtains. It revealed warm colors of an old rug on the floor, washed out wallpaper, and a sewing machine atop of a worn-out table. And Rosalia… Rosalia was something else entirely.
She sat down with us to share her story. A former professional seamstress, she had lost her sight to diabetes in the 1980s. Around the same time, she lost her only son in a tragic accident, and then her marriage fell apart. She found herself completely blind, with no one around to help—just the opposite: she had a bedridden mother to care for. Yet she never gave in.
She continued giving herself insulin injections. She refused homecare for years, insisting on doing things by herself. “I don’t ask for help. I rely only on myself,” she told us with a humble smile. She didn’t have false hopes about what was coming. Instead, she challenged herself to memorize her routes around the city, to count steps, to practice household tasks in the dark—long before the light went out for good.
What impressed me wasn’t just her independence. It was her spirit. For someone who lives in poverty, whose house has no running water, who battles multiple illnesses every day—she still made time for books. Audiobooks were her lifeline. The ability to refresh her library meant more to her than help with daily chores.
She cared for her bedridden mother without sight, figuring out how to feed her by memory alone. “I was wondering how I’m going to put a spoon into her mouth if I don’t see her,” she said. “But I managed!”
And then there’s the sewing machine
Rozalia closes the cover of the sewing machine after showing us how she operates it blindly
When Rosalia finally lost her vision completely, her greatest concern wasn’t survival—it was her professional future. “I was asking myself, how am I going to use my sewing machine?” she recalled. But she didn’t stop. She adapted. She invented a method for using it blind. Her hands still remembered the craft, even when her eyes no longer could.
It wasn’t just her blindness that shaped her experience—it was how the world responded to it. The harshness of strangers cut deep. “Sometimes I accidentally block someone’s way with my stick,” she said, “and they shout: ‘What, don’t you see where you’re going?’ That hurts. I don’t want to get in anyone’s way.”
When we left her house that day, Rosalia guided us through a long, narrow corridor and smiled. “Come again,” she said. “We’ll have a tea party next time.”
Each person’s story holds a lesson. When we search for meaning in our own lives, we often forget that our experiences—quiet, painful, ordinary—are what move the needle for future generations. And when we share those experiences, we make that movement a little smoother for those who come after us.
That’s why I preserve these stories—both in humanitarian work and in family storytelling.