Blind corps member marries colleague in service Hearing the moving story of Isiuwe Daniel Isiwoso, a National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member currently serving at the State House would move the stone hearted to pity. At 14 years, by either fate or design, his collision with a man leaving the Mosque after Jumat prayer led to his blindness and it almost ruined his lofty ambitions. Thinking that life had lost its true meaning and at the verge of committing suicide after wasting excruciating six years at home without a solution to blindness, succour finally came his way. According to him, the journey to surmount odds had started after the six years when he got the opportunity to embrace Braille education that saw him through from secondary school to higher education at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) However, recalling how he embarked on that journey to carving a niche, he revealed that he passed through many tough and challenging situations including the pain and difficulty of depending on his classmates to record lectures, recalling that many people even had to avoid him like plague. Today, he announces triumphantly, that he has cast all that behind him especially after wedding a lady of his dreams on February 1 in Abuja. His spouse equally graduated from the same institution. The union, he noted dried the tears of his mother, who still could not believe that her first son is blind. Facing blindness : It is a long story but I would say that the incidence was more or less a domestic accident, which occurred when I was still a teenager of around 14 years. I was playing with my younger brother, while he was running and I was pursuing him, I collided with a man from the Mosque after Friday Jumat. I fell flat on my face and became completely blind. I lived in Zaria, Kaduna State with my family then. Immediately after the collision I shouted repeatedly that I can’t see again. My eyes had turned inside out that even at the hospital, the ophthalmologists said that they could only do their best medically to return my eyeballs into normal position but it will take divine intervention for me to regain my sight. I visited the best eye hospitals even in Lagos and almost travelled to India before we were discouraged that only God could restore the sight through miracle. It is not possible to calculate the amount we have spent on medication but we spent so much. Since the incident, I have survived by the grace of God because when it became obvious that I have lost my sight after all manners of medical solutions, I spent almost six years at home without going to school, or taking up any vocational activities. It was on my sixth year idling and wasting away at home that the opportunity of going back to school came, but I had to start by learning how to read and write using Braille in a special school in Kaduna. It was after mastering the use of Braille that I returned to secondary school. When I finished, I wrote West African School Certificate (WAEC), wrote JAMB and gained admission to UNN to study Political Science. Living without sight : I faced horrible challenges I would not want to recall again. There were harrowing experiences especially as we don’t have the facilities in this country to aid physically challenged persons like me to study. The study materials for the blind are very expensive. A Braille machine sells for at least N160,000, which made learning more challenging. So, what I did in the university was to get friends that would help me do audio recording instead of using the Braille machine to follow the lecture since we don’t have the equipment. I will listen to the audio recordings, analyse and memorise them and use typewriter on the day of examination to write so that the lecturer could read my scripts and mark them. The frustration came to the head that at a time, I felt like committing suicide. The thought of killing myself took over me when I thought I don’t have any opportunity. But now that am married all praise be to God Almighty. Cuelled from Saturday Sun.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 06:45:36 +0000
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