INSPIRING: Somaia reads a Braille version of the Qur’an, at home in Alexandria.     Photos by Ahmed Hayman

Photo exhibition at Katara pitches inspiring stories of two brave Egyptian women who
overcame the odds in a prejudiced society to find their calling. By Umer Nangiana

Somaia is in her first year studying Spanish in the School of Languages at Ain Shams University. She is one of four visually impaired women in a class of 300 sighted students. Heba has a beautiful, resonant voice of a singer. She plays the piano and is a member of the choir at the Banat Al Noor Association.
Heba and Somaia are two Egyptian women with something special about them. They have managed to break through some of the barriers constricting them, despite being visually impaired.
Using his lens, Ahmed Hayman, an Egyptian photo journalist, tells the stories of the two physically challenged women, who, like many others were expecting the January 25 Revolution in Egypt to change things for them but “that never happened.”
Hayman says the physically impaired still face discrimination at the hands of society, often denied entrance into universities and turned away from jobs.
Heba was born into a middle class family in Alexandria. She is divorced, has a six-year-old daughter, and works at the Alexandria Library. In her spare time, Heba shares her knowledge and experience, working with NGOs to teach others in situations similar to hers. The 27-year-old also sings in a choir, and has a beautiful voice.
Somaia, 18, was born in Alexandria to a simple family in a rural area far from the city. “There, tradition held that if a baby came into the world disabled, he or she should be shut away and that the family should behave as if the baby was never born,” says Hayman.
Somaia’s mother was totally against this tradition and fought hard, pressing her daughter into education and being independent. “The reason why I’m here now is (because of) my mother. She persevered in encouraging me, and helping me to be a normal human being in (a discriminatory) society,” Somaia tells Hayman.
Somaia, who in one of the pictures is shown guided by a fellow student to her dorm at the university, Hayman says, became quickly popular because of her spirit and intelligence. She also does the housework independently. Her mother taught her to fend for herself when she was just a child.
“I can see, but I can’t read or write. My daughter is considered blind, but she reads and writes in three languages; she uses the computer and the mobile phone. I’m the blind one here, (but) she can see with knowledge,” Hayman quotes Somaia’s mother as saying.
Heba, on the other hand is also helped frequently by her closest friend, Sara, when it comes to such activities as flagging a taxi, or buying clothes for her daughter.
Following her divorce, she lives alone with her daughter. She opens the windows of her house only if her daughter is home, or if visitors are coming, as she tells Hayman she does not need light.
 “As I photographed Heba, Somaia, and other visually impaired women that I met, I asked them all: What do you see? Do you dream? What do you see in your dreams?,” recalls the photo journalist, whose photo story’s exhibition is on display for the past few days at Katara Cultural Village, building 18, as part of ‘Stories of Change, Beyond Arab Spring’.
The response was, ‘We have no visual memory, so we don’t really care about it anymore. We feel, we use our hands to touch, ears to hear, and noses to smell. For us, those three senses are more acute than for most other people. We have to accept the fact that we can’t see, and life goes on.’
People with disabilities in Egypt are often marginalised and face discrimination. They find themselves excluded from the education system, overlooked by employers, and disregarded by urban planners.
Many families see disability as shaming, sometimes even as a divine punishment, and disabled children may be hidden from neighbours or held back from opportunities to integrate. Employers mostly believe that people with disabilities will either not be able to do the work, or will present a bad image of the company, and so their doors remain closed, explains Hayman.
People with a disability who do attempt a greater involvement in society are often faced with prohibitive costs, as there are few facilities such as specially adapted transport or assisted tuition that would make the process easier.
Prior to the uprising, he says, a law was passed requiring companies with more than 50 employees to ensure that people with special needs made up at least five percent of the workforce. But the law is weakly enforced, and is often circumvented by firms employing workers with disabilities at rock-bottom wages, and telling them to stay at home, observes the journalist.
After the January 25 Revolution, the situation did not improve, he adds. A number of independent associations however, aim at ensuring that people with disabilities are not marginalised, but can play an effective role in society at large.
Ahmed Hayman was born in Egypt in 1987, and graduated in 2008 from Misr University for Science & Technology’s College for Mass Media and Communications, where he specialised in broadcasting. He became interested in photography in 2005 when he started experimenting with a camera.
Soon afterward, Hayman started his career as a photographer working for Akhbar El-Hawades, a weekly newspaper that specialises in crime and natural disasters. After graduating, he joined the daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, and in 2011 received a Visual Storytelling Diploma from the Danish School of Media and Journalism, in Denmark.
Hayman is a member and co-founder of the project Colorful Future, which finances projects for the poor by offering photography workshops.
His photographs were included in the exhibitions Reporting a Revolution (Copenhagen and Berlin, 2012) and Young Men (Copenhagen and Cairo, 2010-11), and he has held a number of solo exhibitions, including From my Lens to her Dreams (Cairo, 2013) organised by UN-Women & PLAN and, Gaza, a Place in our Hearts (Egypt, 2010).
Hayman’s awards include First Prize, Photo Story in the 2011 Egypt Press Photo Awards, and a gold medal in the Domestic Picture Story category in College Photographer of the Year 2011.