Personality: Suleman Arshad

Blazing Dreams

By Suleman Arshad

I am that person who dreams a lot, there is fire in my dreams. This fire should not be taken negatively; I try to wake people through this fire. I was born in December 1992 in a middle class family. I was the first child in my family who was blind. 

Initially everyone was very shocked, as it was sad news for them because they did not knew how I will spend my whole life. I think they only thought that I will face problems and nothing else. Since I was born in the capital of my country that is why my family had little awareness about special education. I lost my sight gradually. So I studied in general education up till 7th grade, the behavior of teachers with me was very bad as they did not knew how to deal with low vision students. Then I joined Special Education after 7th grade at Al Maktoom Special Education from there I passed my matriculation. Since in my city special education is only up till matriculation so I went back to general education to do my intermediate from Islamabad there the teachers also didn’t know how to treat blind students. I believe that it should be part of teachers training that how to involve and cater persons with disabilities. 

Most of the time society’s behavior and their taunts hurt me very much, but I had to do something. Then I started to make myself stronger, I decided that I would do anything positive possible. Those who mocked me I had to show them that blindness is not a disability rather it is the mindset that is disabled.

After completing my Intermediate in 2013, I decided to go to the University of the Punjab. I started working on improving my skills. So for that I attended a conference in 2014 which is called Young Leaders Conference. This conference proved to be very beneficial as well as life changing for me. My personality groomed a lot and after this I started wishing to become a trainer. I wanted to bring positive change in people’s lives through my words. To fulfill this dream I became a certified trainer from School of Leadership in 2015. 

Now this blind who used to be tensed all the time, had now started helping others by listening to their problems. It became my favorite thing to listen to other’s problems and then help them. Side by side I started social work by getting training from the Active Citizen Program of British Council for which I was selected for the International Study Visit in Morocco for 7 days. Only two people were selected from Pakistan and I was one of the lucky two. From 30 participants I was the only blind individual that was very motivating for me.

I always loved sports, when I lost my sight I had only one option to play blind cricket as there are no other sports available for PWDs in Pakistan. But I was not interested in playing blind cricket at all. Then I started looking for adventure sports for blind. I have been doing rock wall climbing since 2014, people were always curious how I used to do this as I could not see, while I believe that if there is a will to do something anything can be done one just has to have faith.

After all these activities media channels started calling me for interviews. 

Then I had an idea, if I can do all these adventure sports why not other people like me, why don’t I create opportunities for them to do this. For that in 2015 I established an adventure sports club for my community called Pakistan Para Climbing Club. Through this club I started organizing these sports activities for other blind people like me.

In March 2016 I got the chance to go to Japan. I was selected by Sports Development Foundation for the UNOSDP Youth Leadership Camp. There I learned great stuff; I found out that Japanese have different type of sports facilities for blind individuals, that is why they are a developed nation. In this trip I was the only blind person as well but their trainers included me with everyone amazingly and taught me the same things they taught others. The reason to tell all of this is that if you give access to blind people than you’ll know that they are not less than anyone.