Educating young blind children for a better future

Airiel who lives in Penang, has low vision and is one of the children enrolled in St. Nicholas’ Home’s Early Intervention Programme. Due to macular hemorrhage (MVA) in his right eye, he has poor visual progression.

What makes Airiel’s story so heart wrenching is that unlike other children under the programme, he was not born with visual impairment. At the young age of 4 months, he was involved in a car accident and suffered a head injury that resulted in his inability to focus his sight.

Airiel was referred to our EIP programme in May of 2017. Though he has difficulties walking without assistance and some speech impediments initially. We can already observe some remarkable improvement in Airiel. His instructors was so proud that he can now walk with very minimum assistance after only 6 months in the programme. Even his speech ability has developed beyond expectation that he can now understand simple sentences and respond to instructions, and sometimes able to capture whole sentences.

Though his low vision has a big impact on his learning progress, we can see that it is not holding this spunky 5 year old back. Airiel’s fighting spirit has been an encouragement to the entire EIP team and we hope this little warrior will continue to surprise us with his achievements.

With the funding support from donors through GlobalGiving, we hope to be the light of hope for children like Airiel and their family.

I’d like to end this article with this quote:

“There is no chance, no destiny, no fate that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.”

Bravo Airiel!