Man affected by polio teaches his students how to discover their abilities

Wheelchair-bound Amjad Ali, a 21-year-old polio survivor, waits for his students to arrive at the tuition centre he runs in his rented house that is located in a muddy street of Fareed Colony, an underdeveloped neighbourhood of Karachi’s Orangi Town.

Ali has neither higher degrees in education nor enough experience of running an educational institute. All he has is a passion to teach, so he helps educate the children of the neighbourhood. He also offers free tuition to the students whose parents can’t afford to pay him.

Some 45 under-matriculation students are currently enrolled at his tuition centre. He usually charges each student between Rs150 and Rs250 a month for all the subjects. Ten of them, of whom three are orphans, are being taught for free.

“I wish I could educate all the children who don’t have access to education, but I don’t have enough resources,” lamented Ali. “Even being a disabled person, I’d like to contribute to the development of society as much as I can.”

Ali was only eight months old when his parents took him to the hospital with symptoms of polio. He survived the ordeal, but he never learned how to walk. “After surviving polio, whenever I would think about my future, I was always faced with a gloomy picture. It’s really hard for a person to be dependent on others, that too for a lifetime. Such thoughts used to really pull me down.”

But all of that changed when he accepted the saying ‘The hand which gives is better than that which takes’. In 2018 he completed his intermediate education and planned to attend university. Then he got a job as an accountant at a private school.

Now he also pays the school fees of his younger siblings — two brothers and two sisters — and sometimes contributes to the house rent, as their father works as a security guard for a private company and can hardly make ends meet.

After finishing his day job, Ali runs his tuition centre in the evenings. He doesn’t use the traditional methods of teaching. First he helps his students revise their lessons studied at school and then holds special classes to understand the learning curve of every single one of them.

“At formal educational institutes, teachers focus only on exam results. They overlook the need to develop their students’ abilities, which I tend to focus on primarily. Sometimes children need only a little encouragement, and the rest they can do themselves.”

He believes that every single human being possesses a special quality, and when they are able to discover it, they can easily achieve all of their goals. To make his point, he said that many people without any disability lead quite troubling lives because they’re unaware of their abilities, but on the contrary, many people with disabilities lead very successful lives because they know what they’re capable of.

Discussing his future plans, he expressed his wish to set up a free school. Right now, however, he lacks the resources to make this dream come true, while the house his father rents has limited space.

But at least one room of the house has been designated for the tuition centre. “I’d like to enrol more children, but I don’t have enough space to accommodate everyone in a tiny room.” Apart from being a committed teacher, Ali has been a permanent member of the Wheelchair Basketball Association and the Pakistan Tennis Federation since 2017, and the Wheelchair Cricket Association since 2018. He has represented Karachi in many tournaments. However, he is committed to being a teacher. “Playing sports is quite attractive to me, but after a certain age, I won’t be able to continue. So, I’d rather focus on being an educator.”