“When you are faced with a disability, it is important to have someone to lift you up,” Charanpal Singh
NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 28 – They say disability is not inability, and true to this mantra, Charanpal Singh AKA Palo, is not giving up on his career as a mechanic any time soon despite being blind.
Palo, lost his eyesight in 2003 after suffering from Meningitis, which also affected his hearing ability.
Despite this, Palo is the senior mechanic at Range Rover Owners Club Kenya Garage in Ngara, Nairobi.
“I am not a fitter but a fixer,” he says smiling, “ fitters will do the work because either they have nothing else to do for an income or it is just a job. But for me, being a mechanic is my passion. It is in me. They had told me to start playing guitar after I became like this, but here I am.”
Before he lost his sight, Palo owned a garage in Nairobi but he, unfortunately, lost everything to people he thought were his friends. They took away everything.
However, all was not lost as he still had a friend who came in time of need, Aarif Gani. When Gani came back from UK in 2004, he looked for his friend and managed to encourage him to get back to his job despite his condition.
To this day, Gani believes his friend will see again and as he tells me, “I will leave everything to him.”
In our eighth episode of Respect The Hustle, Palo tells us how he manages to fix car especially engines using his hands and his intellect and why he still believes the sky is the limit.
