Earlier today we were invited to a trial opening of the brand new Dialogue in the Dark facility at Ngee Ann Polytechnic here in Singapore. It was a stunning experience.

For nearly 2 hours you get to experience darkness and dialogue led mostly by blind people. Sure, you get to experience (ooops, that’s the third time I’ve used that word in three sentences) different sensations in new ways. But because in B1G1 we know something about how Dialogue in the Dark came to be in Singapore , it’s an even more fascinating learning than normal.

So .. let’s go back.

Since its first opening in 1988 over six million visitors from more than 30 countries have experienced Dialogue in the Dark, giving over 6,000 blind people jobs. The founder, Andreas Heinecke , was honoured by Ashoka in 2005 and by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 2007.

As Wikipedia puts it: the idea is very simple. Visitors are led by blind or partially sighted guides through completely darkened rooms. They are confronted with everyday situations, like crossing a street or finding a bench in a park, without seeing anything.

Roles are reversed, because the sighted people are torn out of their social routines and blind people give them a sense of orientation and mobility. During and after the tour visitors have the opportunity to ask questions they normally might never have asked a blind person. Doing that, escapements are being reduced on both sides.

As a platform for communication the emphasis is not on blindness, but rather on the importance of empathy and solidarity. Dialogue in the Dark (and its off-shoots like Dialogue in Silence and Taste of Darkness (you guessed it, restaurants where you’re served by blind waiters and where you eat blindfolded) seeks to facilitate social inclusion of marginalized people on a global basis.

But Dialogue in the Dark in Singapore is even more. It’s a case of true Social BUSINESS Entrepreneurship.

A few years ago, Ashoka Fellow and Singapore-based friend and wonderfully  ‘crazy’ Social Entrepreneur, Jack Sim, came across Andreas and DITD at the World Economic Forum in Davos. (Jack’s an amazing guy and crazy enough to set up the WTO – not the World Trade Organisation but the World TOILET Organisation . Jack devotes what seems his never-ending time to that cause. Why? Because every 20 seconds a child dies because of poor sanitation.)

Jack and Andreas met again at the World Economic Forum at Dalian in China in 2007  and Jack saw clearly that DITD could be in Singapore. He visited DITD site after site to get as much information and insight (no pun intended) as he could. He was asked when it could happen. That brought a typical Jack-type response: "I don't know when but I know that if I continue to behave everyday as if it'll happen, it'll happen."

At first he thought he could play a part in it in Singapore. Then he realised the impact that might have on his ‘toilet’ work.

So, in a stroke of brilliance, Jack teamed up with the Social Entrepreneurial teaching team at Ngee Ann Polytechnic . He realised this would have so many benefits: on campus it would be a live experience of social entrepreneurship at work; students could easily work there; costs might be lower than in a ‘normal’ business partnership; there’s a ready made audience on campus; the Polytechnic  could make money from it and so on.

The folks at Ngee Ann got it quickly. The ground was broken on the new venue in February 2009 and today, it opened. All done in record time. Jack’s entrepreneurial spirit leading the way.

And today, the very first day of the trial opening, our blind tour guide, Hans, told me how Jack had contacted him through the Blind Society in Singapore to tell him about DITD. “I jumped at the chance to be involved,” said Hans. “Whilst I was liking my job at a call-centre at the time, doing DITD would be like a dream come true.”

So Jack flew Hans to DIDT in Israel where he first met the people who would end up training him in Singapore. For the past two weeks, they and others have put Hans and his colleagues through what seemed to us sighted visitors a most gruelling program – Hans knew every inch of the tour, every nook, every cranny. And yet he’s never ‘seen’ it in the strictest sense of that word.

It just happened that today we were Hans’ first ‘real’ guests. We didn’t find that out until almost the end of our tour in the café (yes, the café is in the dark – absolutely pitch black and you sit around with your white sticks and your guide asking questions and talking about the experience). ‘You’re actually my first guests,” said Hans proudly.

Yet you’d never have known – Hans made the boat ride, the bridge crossing, the park ,the market, the road crossing, the water, the ATM, the monuments – all of it – his and ours. And we really got, yet again, that we all are one. Irrespective.