Assignment 3; Feature Profile

“Shush girl shut your lips,

Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips.

I said, Shush girl shut your lips,

Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips.”

Helen Adam Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia Alabama. She was born normal like other kids but when she was one and a half years old, Helen was infected by meningitis leaving her both deaf and blind. Since then, Helen grew wild and unruly. She became a very difficult child, smashing dishes and lamps and terrorising the whole household with her screaming and temper tantrums. Relatives regarded her as a monster and thought she should be put into an institution.

By the time she was six, Helen’s parent were convinced that she will never be able to see or hear again. They became desperate and contacted Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, the telephone inventor. Only Bell was not just a telephone inventor, he was also a teacher for the deaf. When Bell met Keller, he sensed her innate intelligence and suggested that the family hire a young tutor named Anne Sullivan.

Anne Sullivan herself was partially blind, and at the age of 21 she was asked to live with Keller family and work with Helen. Her method to teach Helen was simple, it was how to spell words with her hands. This method is also called the manual alphabet, which is part of the sign language that deaf people use. Helen’s first word was “D-O-L-L” while the second word was “C-A-K-E”. Even though Helen could repeat the finger movement, she has no idea what it means.

One day, when Anne had Helen’s hand under the water and spell W-A-T-E-R on Helen’s other palm, a miracle happened and something about the water makes Helen begin to understand. On the day itself, Helen insisted that Anne spell the name of everything she touches including Anne’s name. She learned thirty words on that very day.

Since then, Helen started progressing, by the time she was ten, she learned to speak by touching Anne’s mouth when she talked. Even though people find it hard to understand her, she keeps on trying and by the time she was twenty, she entered Radcliffe College and graduated with a degree. Three years later Helen published her first book, “The Story of My Life” which was written with two typewriters, the regular and Braille. Later, she comes out with ten more books and countless articles.

The next big thing Helen and Anne did was they filled the following years with lecture tours, speaking of her experiences and beliefs to enthralled crowds. Her talks were interpreted sentence by sentence by Anne Sullivan, and were followed by question and answer sessions.
 

By October 1961 Helen suffered the first of a series of strokes, and her public life was to draw to a close. She spent her remaining years being cared for at her home. By the end of her life, in 1964, Helen was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, by President Lyndon Johnson. A year later she was elected to the Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair.

Helen Keller died at the age of eighty-eight on June 1, 1968. Her legacy lives on as Foundations and Institutes are formed to continue the work of putting an end to blindness. The Helen Keller Prize is awarded to those who focus the attention of the public on the matter of vision research.

The main reason why I love Helen Keller is because I adore her will to live, and to be successful in this world even though she has lost the sight and not being able to hear. That motivates me to live my life and never give up no matter what happen.