Massage by the Visually Disabled in Mongolia

Mongolia
Speaker: Bayasgalan Maidar　
Title: Massage by the Visually Disabled in Mongolia

The Mongolian Association of the Blind Mongolian was established in 1978 and became a member of the World Blind Union in 1980.  It was furthermore reorganized on May 6, 2005, as the seventh organization of the Mongolian National Federation of the Blind.  The Federation has more than 7,000 members, of whom 1,200 live in Ulan Bator, and five subcommittees have been formed for women, youth, middle-aged people, sports and culture.  In addition, it also has a rehabilitation center, Braille and talking library, radio reading service for the blind and Braille and talking book publishing operations.  There are estimated to be 41,000 visually disabled persons in Mongolia.  However, there are only about one hundred totally blind persons who have found employment, comprising, when including persons with weak eyesight, only about 1.6% of the total, while 98.4% remain unemployed.  Massage therefore plays an important role for the visually disabled.
 
There are currently only a very few visually impaired persons who are engaged in massage.  There are people who perform the traditional Mongolian form of massage while others are engaged in osteopathy.  There is quite a large number of osteopaths.  We are considering the possibility of establishing a massage clinic center.  Many Mongolians like to receive massage from the visually disabled because they think that they have especially sensitive hands and they also know that they are fully capable of making a living through massage.  We would like to establish a massage training school for the visually disabled and we also travel overseas to study massage.
 
Two visually disabled persons returned home about two years ago after studying therapeutic massage in Japan.  They are currently involved in teaching massage techniques to visually disabled persons at our rehabilitation center.  Various training courses are provided to the visually disabled at the center, including Thai, Japanese and Chinese style massage methods.  We are also thinking of including beauty massage as well as massage for stress relief.  Even so, it is still not possible for Mongolians to work as massage practitioners on their own.  The Ministry of Health always expects massage practitioners to work with physicians as their assistants.
 
The problem is that visually disabled persons are not able to study medicine at the university level because of the high cost of tuition.  The visually disabled have a low standard of living and are poor.  They must always work at the same workplace.

There was a blind woman who received massage training in Japan for six months; however, the training was not provided in English.
 
In order to engage in massage, it is necessary to participate in training courses for one to six months or for one year.  I think that it would be desirable for the Mongolian Ministry of Health to provide licenses directly to blind massage practitioners.
 
We currently have two massage centers, both of which are doing well economically.  If it were possible, we would be very grateful if Japanese massage teachers would come to Mongolia as volunteers to teach us.