By Kesah Princely in Cameroon.
Peter Tonain could never dream of using a White Cane when he used to run and play around with friends in his native Ashing, a village in the Boyo division of Cameroon’s Northwest region.
That was because Peter was sighted for nearly the first ten years of his life on Earth.
Today, he is not just a passionate White Cane user but also a strong advocate and leader of a large organisation of blind persons in the once seemingly peaceful but now conflict-ravaged Northwest region.
Born to the family of Joseph Ngong and Margaret Ngong in 1980, Peter enrolled in primary school but was cut short halfway into the journey.
One afternoon, Peter went playing around with friends but little did he know he would not be able to see again later that day.
“I felt like something had entered my eyes and that is how I gradually lost my sight”, he says.
Peter was 9 when his sight was lost and even at that, using a White Cane was not something he considered doing.
The young boy whose teachers envisaged would have a bright future due to his brilliance in school soon saw his dreams dwindling. This is because schools for the blind were not common in the 1980s.
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“I had to forget about education and lived at home for three years before finally discovering that being blind did not mean an end to my dreams”, he hopefully tells DNA in an interview.
Such good news was made known to him by a reverent sister after Sunday mass in his native Ashing.
Immediately, he would be taken to enrol in a school for the blind known as SAJOCAH in Mambu, Bafut, a locality some 12 kilometres from the city of Bamenda, the administrative headquarters of the Northwest region.