By Male Marvin
KAMPALA – The Bible Society of Uganda, popular for publishing, distributing and translating the Bible is celebrating another landmark achievement of launching the country’s very first Luganda Bible in braille to help people who are visually impaired, blind experience the word of God.
The society’s general secretary Simon Mukhama said Uganda has a population of about 2.6 million blind people and “our role is to ensure that every Ugandan who is visually-impaired has a bible they can read.”
This project was funded by the Bible Society of Uganda through the Churches, International Partners and organisations for the visually impaired.
While launching a charity walk aimed at supporting this project in 2017, the organisation said the visually impaired persons complain that due to lack of enough braille Bibles, “their spiritual life is in tatters.”
Barbra Atwine the project coordinator explained that out of the total number of visually impaired people in Uganda, only 47 have afforded the english braille Bibles although about 30,000 people have access to the 127 distributed in different institutions.
One participant at the campaign, Abas Luyombya, said that a braille Bible gives a chance to visually impaired people access the word of God without getting assistance.
Luyombya was again present at the launch on Saturday in Kampala.
Justus Rubarema, the society’s programmes manager, said a braille bible, unlike other bible versions, is bulky and portioned in nature, thus moving around with it might not be possible.
“At first it was made up of 48 portions, but was later condensed into 38 portions. Because it is bulky, one can only carry out a portion of the scripture they are interested in,” he said.
He noted that the bible weighs about 20kgs and has to be stored in a wooden stand to prevent it from wearing out fast.
