Blind, but with a clear vision

Kareem Shaheen

• Last Updated: November 13. 2009 1:23AM UAE / November 12. 2009 9:23PM GMT

When you cannot see, Ahmed Mukhtar believes, there are fewer distractions.

Your mind is not preoccupied. There is clarity of vision and purpose, if not eyesight.

Evidence of his belief lies in his dogged pursuit of the education of blind children.

During the day, Mr Mukhtar is a teacher at Dubai Handicapped Centre, where he instructs children on how to read and write using Braille.

Two or three evenings a week, he volunteers at the Emirates Association of the Blind in Sharjah, teaching Braille to other children at the organisation he co-founded 25 years ago.

Nothing pleases him more, he said, than teaching a child.

“When I studied as a kid, it was hard to receive information in such a way that I could understand it properly from teachers,” he said.

“When I grew older, I felt good about certain teachers who were able to convey information well to the students.

“Everyone can learn, but there’s a way to do it.”

Mr Mukhtar did not lose his vision until he was a teenager, and he remembers what it was like to see.

He recalls watching John F Kennedy’s assassination on television, and the colour of Jacqueline Kennedy’s dress.

He remembers watching Elvis Presley, “the Beatles with their long hair, John Wayne’s cowboy films, Cliff Richard” and black and white Egyptian films with stars such as Farid Shawqi and Oum Kalthoum.

He was born in Dubai in 1954 into a family of six boys and three girls. His family was eager to venture out and try new things, a characteristic that has endured in his life.

“Before oil was abundant, a lot of people from the UAE wanted to work in the other Gulf states like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia,” he said. “My father was one of them.”

His family moved to Saudi Arabia when he was young and returned to Dubai in the 1960s.

As a teenager, Mr Mukhtar got a job drafting letters for Al Shaafar and Nabooda Company. He wore glasses because of weak eyesight.

When he woke one Saturday in 1969, things did not seem right.

“I felt I couldn’t see very well, and every few minutes it got worse,” he said.

He went to a clinic where he was prescribed vitamin A pills, but by that evening he could not see at all.

“Please take me home because I can’t see,” he implored a co-worker, who pushed him away because he thought he was joking.

When Mr Mukhtar began crying, the man walked him home.

His family did not believe him either. But they saw that “I couldn’t tell where the cup of tea was, or where my plate was”, he said.

The next day, a doctor diagnosed him with an irreversible detached retina. After a fruitless trip to Iran seeking a cure, he settled into a life “between four walls”.

“I was sad, my vision was extremely weakened,” he said.

In 1972, the Government sent Mr Mukhtar to doctors in Britain, where he was again told that there was no cure for his condition.

His inspiration for the future came when doctors said he should join an institute for the blind, where he could study and “lead a normal life and not be a burden on society”.

The Government helped him to enrol in a new institute for the blind in Bahrain, where he learnt Braille. In seven years, he had completed the equivalent of primary and middle school, before joining an integrated high school and graduating in 1983.

The process left him with a much-needed sense of normality, particularly since he had little support from his parents, who were uneducated.

Being an older student helped in some ways, he said.

“We weren’t children. We had life experience. We knew how to deal with people,” he said, which meant other people treated him normally.

Graduation left him with a strong appetite for learning, but not all doors were open. Al Ain University would not accept him because he was “a new kind of case” and they claimed to not have the facilities.

“My reaction was… internally it was violent, but not externally,” he said.

Mr Mukhtar engrossed himself in teaching at the Dubai Handicapped Centre, and co-founded the Emirates Association of the Blind in 1984.

Even though the centre was three years old, he was the only teacher with Braille experience. He began preparing material for the students, and soon “there was a change”.

“The children began to learn Braille. They would read and write, and learn the curriculum in the proper way,” he said.

After six years at the centre and repeated attempts to join Al Ain University, he decided to attend Bahrain University, where he studied Arabic language and education.

“My desire from the start was to teach,” he said.

In 1993, Mr Mukhtar graduated and resumed his responsibilities as a teacher at the centre in Dubai. He gave extra classes and contributed his time to the association of the blind.

His work has given him often-critical insights into special needs education in the UAE.

One complaint is with the pace of integration in the school system.

“We like to imitate. Europe wants to integrate, we want to integrate as well,” he said. “No matter that special needs care there is hundreds of years old, and only after that they thought of integrating special needs children in schools.”

The environment surrounding special needs children, something he tries to nurture, was different, he said, because they needed more individual care.

“If you take a plant from one garden and put it in another where the environment is different, it can grow, even if it’s initially weak,” he said. “But with a child, you take him from a centre where he was under a certain system and gets individual care because he was handicapped, and he starts from zero.”

Teachers in the UAE had little experience with special needs children, Mr Mukhtar said.

They should familiarise themselves with their students’ backgrounds, like “family, birth issues, hobbies like video games, the parents’ education, and the influence of housemaids”, he said.

But Mr Mukhtar is sympathetic to the plight of teachers. “The teacher can’t leave 25 or 30 students and teach one student,” he said.

He also resents blind people not being included in discussions about official policy regarding the needs of the handicapped.

“Blind people are not consulted in any work that relates to blind people, even though they’re the ones affected by the problem and who live blind and know their needs and how educational institutions should be,” he said.

“We’re capable, educated, [but] you won’t see officials who belong to this group or to other groups of the handicapped in the ministry’s buildings. How can they relate to the handicapped?”

He believes the country should take deliberate, substantial steps. Much like he did.

“You walk step by step. First you walk, then ride animals, then invent the wheel, then the carriage, then the steam-powered car,” Mr Mukhtar said, smiling.

“But for us, we used to walk, or ride a donkey, and all of a sudden we’re riding a Mercedes. So we speed and cause accidents.”

He said he hoped one message in particular would be heard by everyone: “No human being doesn’t understand. No child cannot learn.”



kshaheen@thenational.ae