Afeefa Amatullah Ally cannot see the diagrams her teachers draw on the whiteboard. She cannot see the notes chalked up during a lesson, or the illustrations in her textbooks. But none of that stopped the 17-year-old from Skeldon Line Path, Berbice, from walking away from this year’s CSEC examinations with seven Grade Ones and three Grade Twos — a result many sighted students would be proud to call their own.
For Afeefa, who is visually impaired, academic excellence was never going to be handed to her. It was something she had to build, subject by subject, obstacle by obstacle, with the people who refused to let her limitations become her limits.
“Being visually impaired provides some obstacles that people who are not visually impaired have to work around,” she told Ignite News matter-of-factly, without a trace of self-pity — just the quiet confidence of someone who has already proven she can rise above them.
Mobility was one of her earliest challenges, particularly in unfamiliar spaces. But the deeper struggle lay in the classroom itself — in the diagrams sketched on boards she could not see, the notes copied down in real time that meant nothing to eyes that could not follow them.
That is where her grandmother, Nazra Appalsamy, 59, stepped in — not occasionally, but faithfully, sitting beside Afeefa in class, recording every lesson, then sitting with her again at home to turn what had been invisible into something she could understand.
“The diagrams the teachers drew on the board, I can’t see that, so to explain it to me was a bit of a challenge. We had to improvise and use textile materials so I could feel what they could see,” Nazra recalled.
It was a partnership built long before Afeefa ever sat a CSEC paper. Nazra said she began nurturing her granddaughter’s learning from the moment Afeefa began to talk — counting on fingers, sounding out the alphabet, watching closely for every sign of how far this child could go.
“These children are gifted in their own ways. Observe your children and you will know how far they could go… you need to be there with them and help them,” Nazra said.
Even with that support, Afeefa had to make hard choices. Practical, visually driven subjects like Biology and Food and Nutrition proved too demanding to pursue alongside everything else, and she made the difficult decision to let them go — not out of defeat, but out of clarity about where her energy would count most.
“I realised that I couldn’t study Bio and F&H and focus as much as I can on all of the rest of the subjects,” she said. Still, there is a hint of what might have been in her voice: “I know I could have done 10.”
Ten subjects or not, what Afeefa achieved speaks for itself. She credits her success first to her faith, and then to the circle of people who never let her feel alone in the work — her grandmother, her mother, and teachers who adapted their methods so that a girl who could not see could still learn everything they had to teach.
For Nazra, none of it ever felt like sacrifice. “Don’t take it as a burden,” she said, offering a message to every parent and caregiver walking a similar road. “Take it as a fun thing.”
Now, with CSEC behind her, Afeefa is already looking toward what comes next. She plans to study social work at the University of Guyana, and in the meantime is gaining early work experience at a business centre — one more step for a young woman who has spent her whole life proving that vision has very little to do with sight.
