To try and explain what the world looks like through his eyes, he asks to confirm, “There’s no one sitting at this table next to us, right?”
If he’s blind, how does he know there’s no one at that round table?
He says he can tell that there are just two shapes, a table and chairs, and if there were a person there, he’d perceive a third shape.
Winona State senior, Mohamed AbdelMagid, spends a lot of time sitting at the round tables in the upper hyphen of Kryzsko Commons where he knows the lay of the land.
After taking the last sip of bottled water, he gets up, walks a few feet, taps the side of a plastic wastebasket with his white cane and drops the bottle into the basket.
When AbdelMagid was about seven years old, his doctor in his home country of Sudan told him he had a type of blindness called retinitis pigmentosa and would lose his sight in his 40s.
“I thought, oh, that’s a long time,” AbdelMagid said.
He was surprised when the world started getting blurry much earlier than that.
By age 12, he couldn’t see the ball to play soccer anymore, and he couldn’t see faces.
In elementary school, he went to a school for the blind and learned to read brail. In his teen years, there were no high schools for the blind and not a lot of brail books available.
At Winona State, AbdelMagid has a program on his laptop called JAWS that reads everything on the screen. He says this program help him to be much more independent.
Technology was one of the biggest reasons AbdelMagid came to Winona State.
His uncle, a professor at Winona State, told AbdelMagid that he would find the technology he needed to learn as a blind person.
AbdelMagid came to learn from technology, but also about technology.
He started out as a computer science major, but said when he came to college he didn’t even know how to turn on a computer.
He didn’t have much experience because the schools in Sudan were, “the worse in terms of technology,” says AbdelMagid.
Programming didn’t appeal to AbdelMagid and soon he switched his major to Management Information Systems.
Although MIS is his major, AbdelMagid loves to learn about a variety of subjects. In his spare time he reads philosophy and science texts for fun.
Over spring break he read all about the evolution of man.
When he graduates, he wants to return to Sudan to start a high school for the blind, and to help blind Sudanese people learn how to use technology.
It has been five years since AbdelMagid has been with his parents, younger brother and three younger sisters living in Khartoum and he misses them a lot.
He says he doesn’t fear for their safety because he knows the war between tribes in his country is not being fought near his family’s home, but he also knows that Sudan is not as safe as it was when he came to college.
He says the whole country has been affected, and that displaced people come into the cities seeking shelter and food in anyway that they can.
When he left the country five years ago, there were very few homeless people and the country was fairly peaceful.
When AbdelMagid first came to Winona State five years ago, he was the only Sudanese student here.
Now there are others and he’s thankful to have them as friends. He says a lot of Sudanese are in the United States as refugees, but not many as students.
Because his uncle works at Winona State, AbdelMagid’s tuition is free. He also receives financial help from the state service for the blind.
He says it’s like he’s getting paid to go to school.
“I’m lucky to be blind in this case,” he says.
AbdelMagid has friends that call out greetings to him around campus and he is able to recognize who they are by their voices.
He says he thinks he also has a special ability to know a person just after a half hour of meeting him or her.
After that half-hour, he says he can tell how smart the person is, how much of a risk taker he or she is, and even if the person is physically attractive.
AbdelMagid has learned to cope with his blindness, so while he may not be able to see with his eyes, he is remarkably perceptive.

Questions or comments?
Contact Lydia at
LCOglesb3075@winona.edu