You may know Academy Award nominated movie star Debra Winger from her roles in 'Urban Cowboy,' 'An Officer and A Gentleman', or her newest movie, an HBO original, 'Sometimes in April' which premiered on Saturday night. Well she's in Belize this week as a goodwill ambassador for 'Sight Savers International' and its local affiliate, the Belize Council for the Visually Impaired. This morning we caught up with her at Hummingbird Elementary School where she was in the infant one class visiting a very special student.
Alfonso Noble Reporting,
When he sits here in this classroom, it's hard to tell the bespectacled Rowan Garel apart from his 5 and 6-year-old Infant One classmates. And even though he fits in: two things are different about Rowan: he can't see, and the fact that you, his classmates and his teacher don't see any real difference in him is why a special guest has come to see him: she is movie star Debra Winger. And though he played along when she sidled up to him, he confessed, he's not a real big fan.
Carla Ayres-Musa, Belize Council for the Visually Impaired
"Do you know who Debra Winger is?"
Rowan Garel, BCVI Patient and Infant 1 Student
"Yes."
Carla Ayres-Musa,
"Who is she?"
Rowan Garel,
"She is a movie star."
Carla Ayres-Musa,
"Have you seen or heard of her movies?"
Rowan Garel,
"No." [Chuckles.]
And today Winger took it in stride. She is the international ambassador for Sight Savers International and she says it is a very personal mission.
Debra Winger, Actress
"I think for myself I have experience with losing my sight temporarily in my life and I saw how different my life would be."
A different life for her, but for Rowan, hardly. And that's because of the work
of his teachers here at Hummingbird Elementary School and BCVI which has provided expertise to allow him to integrate into a sighted environment.
Debra Winger,
"And the work that's being done, for example in Belize, which is a wonderful palette for the rest of the world because here we work together with BCVI and there's inclusion when visiting Rowan in his classroom. He's visually impaired but he's in an active classroom of sighted children."
Joe Garel, Rowan's Father
"Rowan has been attending regular school from preschool and its one of the things through BCVI that has been able to happen. They aide with every, anything, including moral support to start with when we first came back to help us deal with the situation because imagine finding out your child is blind, its not easy to deal with. Then after that they told us to take him to a regular school and we would actually help you with teaching Braille, teaching the teachers how to teach it in a regular classroom, and then after he learnt how to read Braille - get him all the textbooks he needs in Braille. So its been a world of help in more ways than one."
And today, Rowan enlisted the help of his classmates to send a message to the world's most powerful leaders.
Carla Ayres-Musa, BCVI
"It's a worldwide campaign to send children to school. So we have these cutouts that the children are making and decorating which will be sent to the G8 summit in the UK in July and they're basically going to lobby for each child who is not in school to be sent to school, so Debra is helping out with that."
Carla Ayres-Musa,
[Addressing Rowan] "What are you doing a person for?"
Rowan Garel,
"To help people that are not going to school."
A mission that Rowan can grasp because he has been given an opportunity to be treated as special, not different. His father says for Rowan a normal life would be a letdown.
Joe Garel,
"You I'd like to say as normal as possible but to be honest with you, you have to know my son to know that he would never lead a normal life. Although he is handicapped in one sense, if you speak to him you would never understand you are talking to a kid his age. He has a better memory than I will ever have. He puts me to shame many times, he corrects his teacher in the way she pronounces things, and a number of different things. It is just incredible the way he deals with things. It doesn't even occur to him that he is different than anybody else to be honest with you."
Winger will be visiting BCVI students in schools across the country this week.
