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<DIV>Hello.</DIV>
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<DIV>I hope you all are keeping really well.</DIV>
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<DIV>Today we continue our conversation about the crisis of education in
Egypt.</DIV>
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<DIV>Last time, we highlighted the point of lacking creativity and innovation,
as well as the total absence of mutual interaction between the teacher and his
pupils.</DIV>
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<DIV>Well, today I would like to particularly concentrate on the crisis of
education for blind pupils in Egypt.</DIV>
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<DIV>It is not just that I am one of them, although it is honestly part of the
major motivation to write about this.</DIV>
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<DIV>As I mentioned earlier, blind pupils in Egypt are mostly attending the
public school sector, and they usually go to schools for the blind, where they
suppose to have residential care, rehabilitation, and braille education.</DIV>
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<DIV>Well, to be honest, they receive the first and the last privileges only,
which are the residential care, and the braille education.</DIV>
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<DIV>I myself I was lucky enough that I attended the regular education system,
where I received religious education, and I was brailled privately at
home.</DIV>
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<DIV>Thanks to Allah, my parents were financially capable of affording the
cost of paying a private Braille tutor to come to teach me at home.</DIV>
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<DIV> So I was fully brailled at home, and at the school I was able to
follow up with my sighted classmates, just as I am one of them, the books they
had in print, I had them exactly in Braille.</DIV>
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<DIV>That was during my Primary and Preparatory schooling, to be perfectly
specific.</DIV>
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<DIV>In the Secondary schooling phase, I had multiple subjects to study, and
time was quite short.</DIV>
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<DIV>Unfortunately, I was not able to convert these many textbooks in
Braille.</DIV>
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<DIV>I had to rely on my mother, who read for me on a regular basis, and at the
same time, I used to write the lesson summaries in Braille.</DIV>
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<DIV>When I went to college, my textbooks escalated in quantity and quality, and
it was impossible to cope without taping the lectures and the textbooks
simultaneously.</DIV>
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<DIV>That is how I was educated, and I consider myself a lucky person.</DIV>
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<DIV>Well, at the foremost, it was the favor of Allah glory be to Him.</DIV>
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<DIV>One of the ways to thank Allah for His blessed favors, is to strive in
helping other blind people achieving most or some of what I achieved.</DIV>
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<DIV>For many blind people here in Egypt, their educational situation is
catastrophically unpleasant.</DIV>
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<DIV>I am certainly brokenheart for them.</DIV>
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<DIV>So for instance, most blind people in Egypt do not speak English
properly.</DIV>
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<DIV>I currently help my fiance with her English.</DIV>
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<DIV>She is cheap, and she does not have the financial capacity to afford the
British Council English classes.</DIV>
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<DIV>I am convinced that we suffer of a great social gap here in Egypt, whereas
people are racially classified by their social level, which is again, in my
opinion, that is a racial disposal so to speak.</DIV>
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<DIV>To sum up, I am enormously unsatisfied about the worsened educational
circumstances for blind pupils in Egypt, and particularly, for those who sadly
went to the public sector.</DIV>
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<DIV> I apologize for portraying such a negative depiction
but, I had to speak the truth.</DIV>
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<DIV>I have many mates abroad who asked me about the conditions of blind people
in Egypt, so here you are.</DIV>
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<DIV>Well, it is not so darkened, hope is present, and optimism is my essential
temperament.</DIV>
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<DIV>Thank you for reading, and see you next time.</DIV>
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