I Am Ajay: Senior Ajay Lohr learned to embrace himself despite being born fully blind. He has opened up to others after building meaningful relationships with his classmates

While the other kids at Pawnee Elementary would play capture the flag at recess and sing lyrics written on music sheets, then-fourth-grader Ajay Lohr sat inside and practiced braille with his teacher. He’d listen to their laughs and the sound of shoes smacking soccer balls as his finger tips grazed over the raised bumps of letters his friends couldn’t read.

Ajay was born blind, and looking back, he remembers feeling that he lacked the emotional intelligence and maturity the other students had. He couldn’t participate in activities that were common practice for them.

He immediately built a wall — one to protect him from being hurt by the other kids his age. He spent much of his time at school with the vision paras, preferring to spend free time at school on his own. He didn’t think they’d understand the parts of him that were unique — after all, elementary schoolers could be brutal.

Six years, two schools and many attempts at self-acceptance later, that wall would be torn down. It would flip his self-image and ability to form meaningful relationships. He would no longer think of his classmates as the kids who could see what he couldn’t, but as people who complemented his differences. He would meet like-minded peers, who considered him as equal and who he shared interests with. But most importantly, he’d make friends who helped him realize that they were one in the same — despite their differences.

Ajay was born in Delhi, India, where he originally learned to speak Hindi. He grew up in a Catholic orphanage where he was taught braille and English around the age of three. While there, Ajay worked individually with teachers who were trained to help the visually impaired, but he remembers feeling out of place there since the other kids were sighted. 

Ajay felt like an outsider. 

On the other side of the world in the U.S., Jenny and Brian Lohr were beginning the international adoption process, specifically in search of a child who was visually impaired, influenced by Jenny’s close relationship with her brother who was also blind. After reading a brief profile on Ajay, the Lohr’s reached out to the adoption company in search of more information.

“They sent me a picture, and it was him sitting on the floor, eating rice with his hands,” Jenny said. “We fell in love with him.”

When Ajay was five when the adoption papers were signed with Jenny’s signature, he traveled with Jenny from Delhi to Kansas City, Kansas. Minimal, sometimes lonely meals turned into family dinners around a dining table, holidays celebrated by gifts and summer road trips to new places. But Ajay still didn’t feel like he could emulate the lifestyles of those around him.

“My childhood was one that was kind of blissful in the sense that I got to have a normal one,” now-senior Ajay said. “But abnormal in the sense that I always knew that I was adopted. And so I did have to contend with the psychological repercussions of that.”

Those repercussions came in the form of self doubt, fear to open up and allowing his blindness to define him. 

Ajay began attending the Kansas State School for the Blind shortly after the adoption was finalized where he had one clear thing in common with his classmates. Still, bonding with them was hard — sharing a visual disability was often a barrier guarding the possibility to learn anything else about a person. However, it was here that he met Charlie Bethay, a classmate one year younger than him, who was also blind and would soon put a crack in the sheltering, but lonely wall Ajay had built.

At first, the two were something of frenemies, often disagreeing in class or during recreational time at the school. They would even get into “cane fights,” provoked by disagreements about a game’s rules or a problem’s answer.

But over time, the two grew close. Cane fights were no longer, and the two instead spent time creating alternate realities to entertain themselves with.

“We had a day where we decided that anything we knew about math and numbers no longer existed,” Charlie said. “We kind of outlawed them in our own little society and we would get angry if anyone asked us what the time was or the answer to a math problem. For some reason it was fun for us to just decide to live in a world without numbers.”

This bond was one of the first Ajay formed in his childhood, and something that shaped his personality to this day. The two remain close friends 10 years later, and according to Ajay, the reason the two have remained close over the years is in fact because of how opposite they are. Their differences turned into something they could laugh over, and poke friendly fun at.

“Because of Charlie, I was taught that opposites attract,” Ajay said. “That just because two people may have different personalities, that does not mean that they cannot complement one another in a team. There are times when we are together, and it feels like we’re unstoppable.”

Ajay and Charlie parted ways when they both left the KSSB to attend separate Shawnee Mission School District elementary schools, Pawnee and Briarwood. 

Ajay closed himself off from thinking about any new friendships once again. This was the first time he’d experienced the commonalities of a sighted school: crowded hallways, chaotic lunch rooms, braille-less books and students who had no idea what it would be like to be a new student who was blind. 

Because he had been surrounded by people who knew how to work with the visually impaired people, for most of his life, he was reluctant to form any relationships. In this environment, Ajay felt that students talked to him only to show sympathy, and not to truly get to know the real Ajay.

Ajay attended Westridge Middle School, and eventually transferred to East because of the opportunities it could provide for his disability. This also meant he would be in school again with Charlie, who naturally fed into East because of where he lived. Ajay looked forward to the comfort of his childhood friend.

During his sophomore year, Ajay decided to take debate where he met then-sophomore Evelyn Roth. Although the activity itself didn’t mean much to him, his soon-to-be friendship with Evelyn would.

A few months into the school year, Ajay received an email from Evelyn, asking if there was anything he needed help understanding on a recent debate assignment. For Ajay, it came as a pleasant surprise that Evelyn offered help not as someone who felt a need to show sympathy, but as someone who was simply experienced in an area he was interested in exploring.

“I thought to myself, ‘Why is this individual reaching out to me and treating me as an equal, when my entire life people have only seemed to want to show sympathy,’” Ajay said. “Even though there is nothing wrong with sympathy, this was just different from the others.” 

Debate became a time for Evelyn and Ajay to bond. The two were at Olathe Northwest for a tournament, walking down a hallway when he revealed to her how strong his sensory awareness skills were, something he’d never had an opportunity to show off to a friend before. He suddenly stopped.

“In about 10 feet, there’s a wall,” Ajay said.

Evelyn stopped in awe, because it was true — there was a wall roughly 10 feet in front of them. For the remainder of their time together that day, Ajay showed his echolocating skills off to Evelyn. She placed him some distance from an object like a table or a chair, and he’d guess with extreme accuracy how close he was and to what. 

While Ajay showed the unique parts of him, Evelyn did the same. On his birthday, she was bringing him a gift, and decided to bring her pet guinea pigs along. 

“I said to him, “Guess what? I have my Guinea pigs,’” Evelyn said. “ I put my Guinea pig into his hands and I could tell not only by him literally just saying it but from his face that it was an extremely strange sensation for him.”

Evelyn chipped away at Ajay’s wall more and more. After many months of friendship, Ajay realized something: most of the times he’d felt like the odd one out, or excluded or hesitant to make friends, it was because he — not anyone else — was allowing his disability to define him. 

“I knew because of the care that Evelyn had shown me that I had been taking the wrong approach to people,” Ajay said. “I had been letting my blindness define me and it had closed me off from opening up to people who may have had the intentions Evelyn did. I knew I was never going to let it define me again.”

To the people close to Ajay in his life, it’s clear that any hardship, loss or struggle he’s faced as a result of his blindness or past only motivates him to work harder now, according to Jenny. Charlie says that Ajay speaks on “Shakespeare’s intelligence level,” is the “dad-joke” teller of the group and flourishes on his own, constantly assigning himself projects for fun. 

He plans to attend college and hopes to study psychology or law. He doesn’t have plans to let any of these dreams or goals be diminished by anything that he can’t control. 

“It would be a gross inaccuracy to say that [being blind] isn’t a challenge,” Ajay said. “However, I do not and will not ever allow it to define me. I love people for people, I see people for people and I will not allow my blindness to let anyone else do differently to me.”