Muenselling Institute, Khaling (the School for the Blind)

The Muenselling Institute at Khaling, in southern Trashigang, is Bhutan’s first special school and still the country’s institute for visually impaired students. It was founded in 1973 with three students. It is a boarding school for blind children, not an attraction — visiting is something we arrange with the school, and there is nothing to pay.

What it is

Fifty-three years ago there was no education in Bhutan for a child who could not see. A Norwegian couple started one at Khaling with three students, funded initially by KMA, a Swedish women’s mission, and CBM — Christoffel Blindenmission, now Christian Blind Mission. That a school in an eastern Bhutanese valley was set up by Norwegians on Swedish and German money is not the story anyone expects, and it is a true one.

In September 1980, HRH Prince Namgyel Wangchuck formally named it Zangley Muenselling School for the Blind. It came under the Ministry of Education the following year.

What goes on there

The teaching runs well past the academic curriculum, and the institute’s own phrase for its scope is the best summary of it: everything “from walking to earning their livelihood”. Alongside braille textbooks there is music, physical education, computing and Driglam Namzha — Bhutanese etiquette, which for a blind student is a practical subject rather than a formality.

The motto is “Education for all and seeing the world through fingers.”

The figures below are from a national broadcast report in 2013, and we date them because nothing more recent has been published and a number like this quietly goes stale:

• 41 visually impaired students enrolled
• over 100 graduates, 34 of them then in government service
• 26 teaching and 13 non-teaching staff
• the principal named braille production capacity as the thing limiting how many children the institute could take

The Paralympics line we took down

This page used to end by saying that students from Khaling have competed at the Paralympics. We cannot find a source for it anywhere, and we are not going to keep publishing it because it is flattering.

What the record does hold is better, and dated: in 1981 Bhutan sent two students and a teacher to Japan, and they won a bronze medal in a typing competition. A braille typing bronze in Tokyo, eight years after the school opened with three children.

If a Muenselling student has competed at a Paralympic Games, we would like to say so — and we will, with a name and a year.

If you want to visit

Ask us, and we will ask them.

The rule that matters is about photographs. These are children, and they cannot see you taking the picture. Consent that a sighted subject gives by meeting your eye is not available here, so the answer is to ask — and to accept no. Your guide will ask on your behalf if you would rather they did.

Nothing about this page is meant to suggest that the students are the thing to look at. The institute is remarkable; that is a different sentence.

See things to do in Trashigang for the rest of the district — Khaling sits south of the town, on the road down to Samdrup Jongkhar, and the Dangling Tsho trek finishes there.