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Driving instructors for the blind need nerves of steel

Giving driving lessons to the blind in the heart of Berlin demands quick reactions and nerves of steel.

On this June Sunday the German capital has closed off the main boulevard that cuts through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate so that unsighted people from all over the country can experience what it feels like to put their foot down.

Cars narrowly miss bollards near the famous gate, others just make the curve around the Siegessaeule victory column, one of Berlin's best known landmarks.

More than 40 driving school cars are participating in this event organized by driving instructor Rainer Sperling, for whom the thrill in the voices and the smiles on the faces of his unsighted pupils is the motivating factor.

The drivers wear heavily tinted dark glasses and armbands showing that they are unsighted. Among them are a young Turkish woman in a headscarf and an elderly man who proudly shows his driver's license dating from 1952.

"At last I'm using it again," he says.

All are blind or severely sight-impaired and are living out a dream of stepping on the gas, often for the first time in their lives. There are 280 of them -- a record number this year. The youngest is 18, the oldest 83.

Reiner Delgado is doing 50kph an hour heading straight for a row of parked cars. "Brake sharply now," says Sperling.

The car stops just 20cm away from disaster, but Delgado is sublimely unaware, following Sperling's instructions so that he can take off again.

Delgado slowly went blind as a result of a childhood illness. He has accepted his handicap. "I was 20 at the time," he says.

He travels regularly to Lima with his Peruvian wife. In Berlin, where he lives, he is able to shop in the supermarkets and to take his two children, aged seven and four, to the playground.

In the early years, when they were too young to understand what it meant to be blind, they were able to get along by tying bells to the children's legs, so that he knew where they were.

Delgado works as a social worker, using a voice-recognition computer in his office. He likes to go to the cinema. But he has never, until now, driven a car.

Sperling has learnt over the years what he needs to tell a blind driver. He once drove blindfolded to experience driving a car without being able to see, being guided by a colleague in the passenger seat.
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