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A touch in time - Toshtica Sang (left) and Nicola Anderson get a feel of this African mask "This is fun, a lot of fun," said a group of 10 students in unison as they gathered around a table with artefacts.  What is the fun element, one might ponder. These students from The Salvation Army School for the Blind and Visually Impaired were about to experience a time travel of sorts. On the table in front of them was a selection of artefacts from different periods of the history of Jamaica - a drum, a horn, an African mask, Taino implements and a jug with spoons. They covered a timeline, and had a different feel to each of them - smooth, light-weight, multi-dimensional. "Lord have mercy!" exclaimed Toshtica Sang as she picked up a pewter flagon. "This is so heavy. I am going to fall down." Her colleague, Nicola Anderson, grabbed the pewter flagon, (pewter is an alloy of tin hardened with small amounts of other metals such as copper, lead, zinc, antim...

Published: Thursday | March 5, 2009 Frandido Fairweather and Jody-Ann Leavy, students of the Salvation Army School for the Blind, type notes on Braille machines in the school library. - Photo by Amitabh Sharma Diana Ferguson slips a school handout beneath a computer screen and flicks a button. The text appears on the screen, magnified to enable her to read her notes. For Ferguson, who is partly blind, this machine is her lifeline for reading. A student of the Salvation Army School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (SASB) in St Andrew, she would have, until two months ago, to rely on the sole machine in the school. "We had just one magnifier for the 130 students here," said Iyeke Erharuyi, principal of SASB. It was an act of God, Erharuyi said, that Rupert Simms, a Jamaican-born United States-based businessman, offered assistance. "Last year, Rupert Simms visited the school. When we were taking him around the school premises, he saw t...