Sabriye lost her sight in the childhood. Nevertheless, this did not stop her entering the Department of Central Asian Studies at Bonn University, where she concentrated her studies on Tibet. Her visual disability meant that she had to develop her own methods of coping with the intensive levels of reading and writing her course demanded. In May 1997, she travelled alone to Beijing and then on to Lhasa. In Lhasa she found that there were more people suffering from blindness and visual impairment than in any other area of the world.
Cataracts are widespread too.
On her first visit, she was told that Braille had not been introduced in Tibet and that there was no project to help blind children become integrated into society. Travelling around the plateau, talking with blind people and their families, she became determined to set up a project for the region's blind children. And that is what she has done. She returned home in August 1997 to ask for support from the German Government, which she received. She returned to Lhasa in May 1998 with Paul Kronen-berg, a former engineer from the Netherlands.