FEATURE | A Blind Girl at Boston University: “I am happy to be here at the right time and the right moment in my life”
Shalmarie Arroyo Mercado (middle) volunteered at Cradles to Crayons in Boston
Scanning the surrounding area with a white cane, Shalmarie Arroyo Mercado slowly walked up the stairs at the front door of her residence Bayridge Residence & Cultural Center, which is an independent off-campus housing for female students who come from different countries and are enrolled in various universities in Boston.
The residence is located within the historic Ayer Mansion, one of the only three surviving residence designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The house was built with light-colored granite ornamented by mosaic panels over the front door.
As her cane touched the edge of the wooden door, Mercado reached out her hand to grab the knob and opened the door. On the right side of the lobby, the chapel pavilion, which was decorated with semitransparent glass, glowed on the stairs.
Mercado meandered through the living room in front of the library and steadily walked downstairs to the basement. She sat on the blue sofa and put down her cane. Without taking off her black down-coat and black sunglasses, she started recalling how she became blind.
Seven days before her 13th birthday, after school, Mercado was picked up by a person sent by her mother, who was busy with running her restaurant. The person who worked for Mercado’s mother and was close to her family would drive her home.
On the way back home, the driver speeded on the highway and lost control. When the driver attempted to pull over to the side of the road, the car crashed into a truck parking there. Immediately, the front windows were smashed into pieces. Mercado, who was sitting in the front, clashed violently against the front windows and lost consciousness.
When she woke up, she couldn’t see anything but heard the driver screaming, “Please! Don’t die!” The glass slags thrusted into her eyes, jabbed into her cheek, cut her jaw, and broke her nose-bone. From then on, Mercado lost her vision.
Mercado’s mother always feels guilty about the accident, saying that if she could pick up Mercado, the accident couldn’t have happened. But Mercado never blames her mother.
“It’s not my mother’s fault,” Mercado said. “It’s an accident. It could happen to anyone.”
When being praised as a brave person, Mercado shrugged her shoulder, “I think everybody is brave. People who had gone through that always decide to move on, because there is nothing else they can do.”
Mercado had passed entrance exam of a high school that her elementary school is affiliated with, but the school refused to accept her because it had no history of assisting blind children.
With the help of National Federation of the Blind, an organization operated by blind people to help other blind people to become independent and competent in all aspects of life, Mercado’s parents went to the school, arguing against the discrimination towards the disabled.
The school conceded, and Mercado was enrolled in the high school. She became the first blind student in her school.
Her high school teachers gave Mercado test orally so she could answer it by typing in the computer installed with voice-over devices.
She is grateful that her math teacher taught one-on-one lessons to her after class – while she could read textbooks by turning them into audio versions, it was difficult for her to learn math graphs that could not be transformed into audio.
Since high school, Mercado has been in love with dancing. She can dance Latin, salsa, waltz, and ballet. She said that dancing vitalizes her and brings her energy.
“It’s an investment. Not many people see it as an investment because you would not get money out of it,” she said. “But I regard learning arts as an investment because I got happiness and passion from doing it.”
She graduated from the high school with perfect grades and entered the University of Puerto Rico.
Unlike most blind people, Mercado was adept at listening to audiobooks but could not read Braille, a code system of raised dots that can be read with the fingers.
Until she graduated from the college in 2016, she received Braille training at Louisiana Center for the Blind, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching blind and deaf-blind individuals living skills.
Now, she can only read 60 words per minute. In order to practice reading with fingers, she reads many children’s and fantasy books.
She knew that there were many blind people out there dealing with everyday challenges. So she volunteered at National Federation of the Blind, teaching the blind how to use screen-reader on Apple devices.
After that, Mercado discovered her highest calling — helping people like her. To get closer to her dream, Mercado decided to study Public Relations at graduate-level, so she enrolled in the College of Communication at Boston University.
According to Mercado's friend Yige Wan, Mercado never complains about heavy workload in graduate school, participate in class discussion actively and never acquires special care from professors or classmates.
Wan said, “I don’t feel she is any different from us. She is so outgoing and adorable. As her friend, I really admire her.”
Mercado was determined to work for a non-profit organization in Boston or New York City to campaign for blindness awareness, educate people like her the importance of Braille-learning, and inform them about what opportunities they have.
She is reluctant to work in her hometown of Puerto Rico where the public transportation is inefficient, and she is not willing to become dependent on her family again. Compared with Puerto Rico, Boston has much more blind-friendly public facilities. Therefore, Boston is her number-one choice.
Being over 1600 miles away from her home, Mercado misses her family and her boyfriend whom she had been together with every day before she came to BU.
Her boyfriend, three years older than her, is studying nursing in Puerto Rico. As she described, her boyfriend is fun, outgoing, and adventurous.
"It's so sad not seeing him. He always supports me," Mercado said. “Having a supportive boyfriend is one of the best moment in my life.”
When asked about how she deals with long-distance relationship, she said she is confident about it because she is not looking for someone else, and most importantly, they both have serious commitment to each other.
“What I worried about most is being alone,” she said.
But her worries faded away as she met many new supportive friends in Boston. Mercado loves watching movies with her friends. Although she could not see the screen, she could feel what is going on by listening and using imagination. As she loves listening to music, her friends from different countries gave her music lists.
“I love Boston,” she said. “I am happy to be here at the right time and the right moment in my life."
