Meet Uganda's Blind Hairdresser

Aisha Bahati doing her thing...

Esther Oluka had an encounter with a rare talent. She's blind but refuses to be limited by her situation. See as Esther reports.....

It is a Thursday evening, roughly about 5pm. The weather is cold as the rain just stopped. I am at the boda boda stage of Nsambya, Kevina, a suburb located in the outskirts of Kampala, waiting for Sumin Nanyonjo. 

She calls me asking what I am wearing so as to easily idenfify me. “A blue blouse with a black and white coloured knee length skirt,” is my response.

Moments later, a lady who is smiling walks up to me and asks, “Esther”? I nod in approval. “Hoping I did not make you stand for long?” she inquires. Calmly, I respond, “No, you did not,” Nanyonjo then leads me to her salon which is a very short distance away from the stage. It is about a five minutes’ walk.
I am specifically going to see her younger sister, Aisha Bahati, who works with her.

Bahati is not your ordinary hairdresser, she is blind. As soon as we arrive, my attention immediately focuses onto the smartly dressed woman in a colourful kitenge standing behind the counter at the entrance whose hair is neatly tied in a bun.

She is sewing a hair weave onto a woman’s head using the needle. Nanyonjo right away lets her know that we have arrived. The woman in return conveys her greetings and introduces herself as Bahati.

She tells Nanyonjo to take over the hairdressing before carefully walking to the end of the room and pulling out two white coloured plastic chairs.

The room, or rather salon, is like a cubicle of sorts. It is very tiny.
Just as our conversation kicks off, I notice that Bahati’s eyes only bear the brown pigment.

I can hardly see the pupils. My inquisitiveness draws me to my first question, do you see anything? 
“I can only see white light. But if you extended an object near my eyes, I may be able to identify what it is by the colour,” she says.

She asks that I extend any particular object of my choice near her eyes so that she can identify it for me.

I draw my phone and headsets closer and she manages to disclose not only their identity but colours as well. Both are black. It is just amazing how she does it. Just one glimpse and bang! She has the answer.

How she lost her eyesight
Bahati was only seven years old when she lost her eyesight.

Her encounter with an expired drug administered at a clinic in Jinja when she suffered fever dealt her this blow.

Her body started to develop small swellings. She was admitted at the same health care centre for about two months before being discharged.

“Life went on normally until one month later, my eyes started itching uncontrollably. The pain was too much as well,” she says, adding, “And during the days that followed, I slowly began to lose my sight.”

She was then taken to Father John’s HealthCare Centre in Tororo for examination.

Culled: monitor.co.ug