• It was a normal day in school. All the kids in kindergarten class were playing and having fun.

    That's what it looked like at first glance. If you looked hard enough, you would see a small girl sitting under the plastic jungle gym in the middle of the room.

    Her name was Sarah Robertson, and she was about four years old. She had waste long brown hair that was tied in a pony tail so it would stay out of her brown eyes. She wore a plain white T-shirt, blue pants, and running shoes. She looked like an average kid.

    Despite her looking normal, she hid under the jungle gym, isolated from all the other kids in the class.

    "Sarah," the teachers would ask. "Aren't you lonely?"

    "Yup," Sarah would answer quietly. She never said much because she was shy. She had trouble fitting in with the other kids, so she spent her time alone.

    "Why don't you go play with the other kids?"

    "They don't like me," Sarah would reply. "They don't want to play with a blind girl..."

    Sarah had a visual impairment. She wasn't completely blind, but she was losing the vision in her left eye and her right eye was at risk of losing its poor vision.

    "You have sight," the teachers would say. "You're not blind."

    "I can't read, I can't write, and everything looks like one thing," Sarah would say. "Nobody wants to play with someone who gets hit in the head every time a ball comes at her."

    The teachers would leave, not knowing what ells to say. They had no idea how to comfort little Sarah, or even make the other kids come to except her the way she was.

    Sarah knew that the teachers meant well, but they weren't helping at all. It just made her feel worse. She would sit there, under the jungle gym every day of her kindergarten life, thinking about what made her different from everybody ells in the entire school.

    Sarah Robertson would grow up this way, occasionally making a friend who saw past the disability. She would lose all the vision in her left eye, but her right eye would never change for many years.

    She would leave the school at age seven only to be put in a boarding school for the blind. Her parents would tell her that it was the best thing for her because she would learn how to read, write, play, and live the way other people like her lived.

    She would leave her old friends and go to the new place, where she met hundreds of people just like her.

    Sarah made more friends than she ever hoped for, and they were more than willing to play with her. She would play tag, soccer, and all the other games she could never play at her old school.

    Her life was easier, yes, but even though she had friends, she still felt alone sometimes. She would refuse to be alone because it would remind her of the time she spent under the jungle gym...