Umme Salima Chowdhury (visually impaired)
My name is Umme Salima Chowdhury and I am visually impaired since my birth. In my family, I have three sisters, and four of us are blind since birth. However, I am from a prosperous family, and my father is a businessman and mother is a housewife.
Because of my visual impairment, my schooling started at the Muradpur government blind school. During my school and college life, like other visually impaired persons of Bangladesh, I faced tremendous obstacles regarding my studies as at that time the reading materials were not that much available apart from few braille books which were also not sufficient in quantity. Reading materials in Daisy, E-Pub, accessible audio or digital Braille were out of the question. Eventually, I passed SSC in 2006, and in 2008, passed HSC from Chittagong Government City College. Later, I completed my Master’s degree in 2015, from the department of Sociology of the University of Chittagong. In the meantime, I came in contact with YPSA and I become one of the hundreds of beneficiaries of YPSA’s “Capacity building” initiative and it was also the turning point of my life because after being involved in this project I found my goal of life which is to become a teacher. After that, I have enrolled for my BA in Teachers Training College, Chittagong. Besides, now I feel much more confident, and the quality of my CV has definitely improved while in the past, during job interviews, I faced lots of problems and discrimination because of my disability and relative incompetence.
Truly, this project has changed hundreds of visually impaired person’s life just like me by Producing and Distributing DAISY Digital Talking Books along with relevant training, and for that I am grateful to YPSA.