JEDDAH, 10 January 2007 — In spite of their challenges, disabled students at King Abdul Aziz University (KAAU) have succeeded through the same self-disciplines inherent in any successful academic. But a little help from the university’s office of students with special needs has also helped.

“In the special needs office we play the role of linking disabled students with outside events and activities,” said Ahlam Mufti, head of the special needs office in the university’s women’s section.

Sahar Al-Humtani is the first student of her kind to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the university. She can design documents on a computer using Photoshop graphics software. Al-Humtani is also blind. With the help of her brother, she managed to navigate her way through a home computer.

Most of the students the office attends to suffer from partial or total blindness, about 20 to 25 each semester. Ten to 15 students that enroll each semester have different types of disabilities. Mufti said that the blind face more difficulties in studying since they are dependent on volunteers who attend lectures with them and write notes.

The university does not yet accept deaf students because the university doesn’t meet the educational needs of the hearing impaired community. “The university does not offer sign language yet,” Mufti said.

Although God has taken the blessing of sight from them, He made it up and gave them the ability to innovate without using their eyes to see. “The girls are really talented and many of them can write poetry, draw and paint and were able to achieve many prizes,” said Mufti.

The office maintains continuous communication with the students’ families in order to draw attention to their talents. “The students participated in some of the events and sometimes they have to go out in the evening,” said Mufti. “I was able to convince the families to let the girls go out and express their talents.”

Huda Karteel, 26, is a senior student who is supposed to graduate this year with a bachelor’s degree in Arabic. “A volunteer assistant helps me in writing the lectures while my sisters help me in preparing for the exams,” she said.

Karteel is also a talented painter. She has displayed her work twice in the “Made By My Hand” exhibition at the university.

“All my paintings were sold in the first exhibition except for one,” she said, adding that she’s getting ready to participate in the third exhibition this year.

Karteel got a bronze medal in the art and painting competition held by the art club in KAAU and received a financial prize of SR500. She said that she hopes to be an Arabic teacher after she graduates and work to improve educational methods for the blind.

“Blind people have an inherent fear of electrical outlets,” she said. “I want to invent an iron that does not need an electrical outlet to work. Instead it would be charged using a battery with a click of a button.”

Mufti also helped the KAAU special needs students participate in the annual World Disabled Day that took place at the Disabled Children’s Association (DCA) on Dec. 7 last year.

They also attend recruitment seminars. One of the physically disabled students at KAAU got her job through this event. Turkia Al-Malki is now working in the special needs office of KAAU. “Because she is disabled, she feels more for the students who have special needs,” said Mufti.

Al-Malki said the assistants are also students at the university and the center helps work out schedules that allows them to juggle their work helping their blind colleagues and their own coursework.

According to Al-Malki, the office now has more facilities and is more advanced. To make it even better, she hopes that the office offers books written in Braille language for the sightless students, the thing that Mufti is trying hard to get it as she commented. “It would be nice to have electrical wheelchairs instead of manual,” said Al-Malki.

Among the talents the girls were special in was writing articles and translating a whole edition of the university’s magazine “Nawafith” in Braille. Amal Al-Ghamdi, an Islamic studies student, translated the fourth and seventh editions of the magazine into Braille to enable her sightless colleagues read it.

Al-Ghamdi said she faces many difficulties at the university being a blind student. “We do not have curricula in Braille, which makes us depend on audiocassettes that our assistants record during the lectures,” she said. “Some courses need up to 14 cassettes. It takes a lot of time to look for a certain lesson or information in the cassette that is almost an hour long.”

Blind students in KAAU are graduates from Al-Nour Institute where they got their high school degree. The curricula they had were all in Braille language. “We were shocked when we entered the university... Because the courses were not available in Braille... That made our academic level drop... We were excellent at school with all the facility and support.”

She said that all the services at the office are available for their help except for the curricula. The students are treated similarly when it comes to exams and attendance grades. However, when they have to miss a class, some professors overpass absence. “We cannot afford to miss lectures because we basically depend on our attendance to take the notes that we use to study, but in case we had to miss them, professors are understandable when we explain our situation.”

Al-Ghamdi participated once in the competition in the Arts Club at the university when she decorated a CD using beads and colors. “My colleagues witnessed that my work is brilliant but the supervisor put me down when she refused to even consider giving me a participation certificate. That’s why I consider this participation as the first and the last one in that club although I love arts and I find myself talented in painting and decorating things. But I did not get the opportunity to express that talent,” she said.

Many of Al-Ghamdi’s decorated items were sold in the “Made By My Hands” exhibition. She decorated cups and tissue boxes as well as invitation cards.

“My dream is to be a journalist and I’m happy that Saeed Al-Mughais who is the editor of Windows Magazine is supporting me to write stories and articles. I did feature stories and interviews which were published in the magazine,” she said.

Al-Ghamdi thanked the efforts of Mufti and Reem Al-Tuwairgi at the university’s students affairs department.

As blind girls depend a lot on volunteer assistants, there are almost 35 volunteers who are in touch with the office and who enjoy helping the students.

The leader of the volunteers, Safiyya Al-Shaibani, is a student in the third level of Business Administration College in KAAU. She said her family was the first factor that made her interested in assisting the disabled and join the volunteers. “My father is an architect who utilized his engineering skills to serve the disabled people and design his work in order to fit all people including them,” she said. Her mother is also a sociologist, which made Safiyya start in her freshman year to be an assistant for the blind during their exams to read the questions for them. Her help then developed to supporting them to participate in many events inside and outside the university.

“The girls are really talented in different fields which made me feel that we as normal people are less perfect than those people. I believe that when God took the blessing of sight, He gave them the ability to be more sensitive and artistic in painting and all the other talents they have.”