A YOUNG « BLIND » MAN LOOKS TOWARDS A GOOD FUTURE
Ndihokubwayo Jérome was born a healthy little boy in 1994 on Mugerera hill in Kiremba commune in Ngozi province in northern Burundi. He is the fifth child of ten brothers of Macumi Nicolas and Ndiragora Thérèse.
However, he has lost his sight since contracting an eye disease in 2010 at the age of sixteen when he was a fifth-grade primary school student.
The beginning of his blindness began with his eye hurting, and after a few days, the eye ended up completely seeing nothing. This is how life began to become complicated for Jérôme because his second eye was even attacked.
When his parents took him to an eye doctor, he told them the child lost his eyes because of disruption of the nerves that lead to the brain. Hard to support « It can be quite difficult when you grow up with sight and then lose it as an adult. You have to make a lot of adjustments, it’s really a mental and emotional challenge, » Jérôme explained to us. His friends, his brothers, those around him and even his parents did not understand what had happened to him. Everyone didn’t want to go near him for fear that they would lose their sight like him.
All of these stigmas caused Jerome to begin life with most of the odds stacked against him. To protect himnself from mockery, he was forced to leave school to isolate himself far away at their house behind the house where he spent the whole day.
A few days later, a man came to their home and found him blind, a situation that upset him. This man subsequently suggested to his parents that they enroll him in a school for the blind like him called « Hope for the Future » The latter was located in Kijuri in Matongo commune in Kayanza province and belonged to a certain Daniel Ntiranyibagira, also blind.
This is how he was lucky enough to be admitted to this school where he was obliged to move back from the 5th to the 1st year to be able to first master the braille writing used by the blind to study and communicate in writing.
Unfortunately, due to an economic crisis which shook this establishment, it did not continue to operate normally. Its founder had been recruited from another foundation with the mission of caring for the visually impaired. Children who were taken care of in his school, including Jérôme, had been transferred to his new destination, the Uwiragiye Foundation located south of the city of Bujumbura.
It was this same foundation that finally pushed Jérôme to another school where he distinguished himself in class. Not a very satisfactory one It was in 2019 that Jérome started eighth qrade at the Penn Blind School of the Uwiragiye Foundation.
As soon as he arrived at the foundation, he set an example of his courage in studies with an interest in completing post-foundation and university education with a view to becoming a journalist according to him, as evidenced by his grade. 130 out of 200 points in the national competition where he competed with the clairvoyants.
Jérôme was subsequently oriented to the language section at the Gitega Wisdom High School, formerly CND which also accommodates students with disabilities. It is the only secondary school of excellence to have adopted the inclusive education program throughout the country, initiated since 2010 by the governnment of Burundi.
Despite his visual handicap, teachers and his classmates have been surprised by this boy since his arrival in this section in View of the results he obtains in classes and the place he occupies in class.
In 1st year 1st term, he was 4th among 22 students with 59%, 2nd term 6th with 64%, 3rd term 3rd with 65%. In 2nd year, 1st quarter 4th with 61%, 2nd quarter 3rd with 64% and 3rd quarter 3rd with 65% in 23 students.
Currently this courageous blind boy is preparing to take a national test to enter university education, which will allow him to realize his dream of being a journalist, the spokesperson for his peers with a common problem.
The results of this last year of his secondary studies show that he performed well, ranking first among the 23, with a mark of 64%. In the 2nd term, he occupied 5th place with a score of 62.5%.
During our interview with Jérôme Ndihokubwayo, he told us that: »{… changing from one school to another helped me build my confidence. I learned to express myself and live with visually impaired peers like me and people with various disabilities. » He finally showed his gratitude to the Uwiragiye foundation.
His current situation is the result of the efforts, generosity and kindness of those responsible for the foundation, namely Sylvie Uwiragiye, who takes care of all his needs, he emphasized. He ended with an appeal to parents and family caregivers to break the silence surrounding this scandal of depriving children with disabilities the right to be educated like others, the only opportunity that could help them improve their lives and become fully independent recall that over the past decades, Burundi has made great progress to realize the rights of persons with disabilities, notably by ratifying the international convention on the rights of persons with disabilities on March 26, 2014 and the protocol to the African charter on the rights of man and peoples relating to the rights of persons with disabilities…
Unfortunately, it is clear that young people with disabilities like Jérôme continue to face enormous inequalities and obstacles to realizing their rights to education and decent, dignified and fulfilling work.