National 9 (Spotlight Weekly)

Groping For Equality

The newly elected president of the National Federation of Disabled is all set to empower the disabled persons of the country and ensure them equal rights

By THAKUR AMGAI

"I felt that god had sent me to work for the welfare of the disabled community and decided to spend the rest of my life advocating to ensure equal rights and opportunities for them."

Pokhrel : Set to ensure right

This is Birendra Pokhrel, reminiscing his state of mind eight years ago, when- after a painful trauma amid faint hope of recovery for three years- he accepted that he would have to live the life of a visually impaired.

Nothing could be more poignant than to know that one's sense of vision which had been functioning perfectly well till the other day has been dysfunctional and will never revive again to a man of early twenties. He had seen the beauty of the small part of the world but had desires to see much more. It would be difficult for any one to accept this reality and so was it for Pokhrel. He spent the next three years confined in the four walls of his residence.

"I was very depressed and underwent a great psychological trauma during that period," reminisces Pokhrel.

Only then he started to come out of the closet of the house and accept the challenge. "I began to take it positively," said Pokhrel. "I thought god had send me to work in the sector of welfare of the disabled persons. So I decided to work for them."

He needed a decent source of income to earn a living. So he decided to change the model of his residential building to a commercial one. Once the house started giving rent and he was assured of his livelihood he could spare his creativity for social activities. But before that he had to empower himself with various aids. He had learned to walk, read and live as any other normal person and after he was visually impaired he had to start it all over again in a new form. So, with the support of his wife, he learnt mobility for walking around without support, brail script for reading and computer skills for the visually impaired.

Once he got equipped, he started taking part in the programs and meetings of the visually impaired actively and was consequently elected the president of Nepal Association of Blinds, Kathmandu District Branch, in 2000. Obviously he is more privileged than most of his counterparts for he is educated and has seen the world for a long time.

Soon, in less than half a decade he worked his way through to the president of the National Federation of Disabled, Nepal.

Retrospection of one's college life makes anyone ponder about their future. He was a very intelligent and hardworking student back in his school days.

Born in 1967 in Kathmandu, he was privileged to get good education from the early childhood to the university level.

Later he had joined a project of United Nations Family Planning Association (UNFPA) as a trainer for Promotion of Family Health. In 1994, when he was in one of his official visits to the districts conducting training he started to feel a difficulty in reading the lines projected from the overhead projector. He instantly abandoned the training and came for medical check ups in the Kathmandu. He would know only after a couple of check ups that he was affected by Optic Atrophy- a disease of optic nerves. Doctors flatly told him that the impaired vision could not be revived and the reason of the disease was unknown.

He was not convinced. "I continued showing my illness to the doctors," said Pokhrel. He recounts that he had shown his eyes to more than hundred doctors and sent his medical records to hospitals of London and the USA. "But I got the same reply from everywhere that it was impossible to revive the vision in that sort of illness," reminisces Pokhrel.

Less than a decade later, he has now become the hope for all the disabled of the country to ensure their rights. This is obviously the reason why they elected Pokhrel as the president of the welfare organization by an over whelming majority. Over the years, Pokhrel has empowered himself pretty well. He has particularly mastered in the skills of using computer and is already well known among the disabled community of the world. He has represented the country in various international programs in the capacity of an educated blind.

He is now set to empower his counterparts. "In the coming up days I will advocate to ensure the rights of the disabled in the country," he says. "We are beginning with the right to accessibility." Indeed, not to talk about the mediocre buildings, even big office complexes and public premises do not have space for running wheel chair.