Thailand: Smelling courses for visually impaired
Smelling Learning course to “open up one’s nose” and make every breath a learning experience.
The ability to make use of any sensory experience helps increase our quality of life in many ways. This is also true for people who have lost one or more sense as there is always opportunity to develop the remaining ones and enjoy a more delightful life.
The Givaudan Foundation partnered at the end of 2019 with an organisation specialized in initiatives aiming at making “scents” more meaningful in the everyday life of visually impaired people.
This project, also called “Make every breath a learning experience”, was initiated by a team of volunteers from Givaudan Thailand and Singapore. Its purpose is to help blind and partially sighted students make effective use of their olfactory senses.
To do so, fragrances grouped in different families (home-like smells, outdoor smells, adventure-like smells) are explored through tales. This allows the students to be fully immersed in the stories they are told and getting to experience the associated smells.
Overall, 340 visually impaired students will benefit from these courses and aspiration is to have this type of class formally established in all school for blinds of Thailand.
