Meruyert Yussupova embodies this principle through her unwavering commitment to growth: a PhD student while raising three children, building an inclusive school, and continuously developing new teaching approaches. Her entrepreneurship began not from ambition but from compassion, yet she refused to remain limited by her initial knowledge. She sought training, mentorship, community, adaptation of methods for visually impaired children, and better systems of delegation, every step grounded in humility and the desire to serve.
Her life illustrates Abai’s belief that a teacher must be both a seeker of knowledge and a custodian of care. She does not perform education as a ritual or chase prestige; instead, she treats learning as a moral responsibility. Through self-discipline, she sustains her faith in the value of education, in children’s futures, and in her own evolving capabilities.
Before she ever imagined herself as a business owner, Meruyert thought of herself as a quiet, capable girl who liked languages and avoided the spotlight. She grew up in a traditional Qazaq family where respect for elders was unquestioned and daughters were expected to be modest, diligent, and close to home. English came easily; she won school competitions and later chose “International Relations” at university largely because of that gift. But even then she never pictured a classroom full of children calling her “teacher,” much less an educational center with her name on the door. “In childhood, I never wanted to be a teacher and didn’t plan to go into business at all,” she recalls. “It all happened naturally.”
At university she married young and became a mother while still a student. By the time she graduated, her first child was two. She did what seemed sensible: looked for a proper office job in her field. They lived in Almaty, renting an apartment, paying for daycare, and watching their salaries disappear on the first of every month. “Our salaries, combined with my husband’s, barely covered expenses,” she says. The days were long; the evenings were rushed; her body started to protest in the only way it knew how, frequent illnesses, hospital visits, a constant sense of running on empty. Yet even in those years another life was quietly forming. To earn a little extra, she tutored English. At first it was simply a side job, a way to buy diapers and groceries without counting coins. But these hours with students felt different: lighter, more alive. Later, when the family moved to Issyk to live with her parents and she was commuting one to two hours each way back to the city, acquaintances there invited her to teach in a new educational center. The schedule was flexible, the pay similar to the office job, and her son was nearby. She agreed.
The pattern repeated when they later moved to Talgar. With a second child now in the family, she met another center owner, this time a special educator who worked with a psychologist and speech therapist. “We started talking, she learned I taught English, and suggested I open a group,” Meruyert says. Students came again, just a few hours every other day. She still did not call it a career. She tried reselling goods, network marketing, and different “small business” schemes that promised quick money and freedom. None of them stuck. Her body kept reminding her that long commutes and fixed hours were costing her health. She was tired, her children were often sick, and “eventually, I decided it was time to leave.”
Then came quarantine. Offices closed, but her students said, “We still want to continue studying.” Talgar’s restrictions were softer, so she continued teaching. Suddenly she found herself at home she says, “but in winter, problems arose: the heating didn’t work.” Once again her body became the messenger, cold rooms, strain on her already fragile vision. She knew she had to move.
Her diagnosis is serious: in her left eye she sees almost nothing, officially a thirddegree disability with 25–50 percent loss of work capacity. Dry air, artificial light, long hours at the computer trigger headaches and high blood pressure. About once a month she has to stop everything and take sick leave for several days. For years this diagnosis lived like a shadow, something she managed but didn’t talk about. It affected how others saw her too. “People often thought I was arrogant because I didn’t greet them … I simply couldn’t see them,” she explains. Teachers said she had a “stern look.” She carried those misunderstandings quietly.
The move from the unheated building led to a bigger space, four rooms in a residential block that fit her growing classes. Students kept coming; her third child was born; and she understood that she could no longer do everything alone. She began hiring teachers, step by step. At the same time, her disability brought an unexpected opening. Teaching at the Blind Society’s building, she met Aidos, a young man with a more severe visual impairment who had won a grant to teach children English. He invited her to join the project.
“Before that, I had never thought about teaching children with visual impairments,” she admits. But as they worked together, she realized she could adapt her methods. She already needed large-font assignments for herself; she simply extended the same practice to the children. Together they developed a program for visually impaired students, spread the word in Talgar, and groups quickly filled. The town, long home to many people with low vision since Soviet resettlement policies, responded. Parents brought their children to a teacher who not only knew English but also understood what it meant to squint at a page and feel the world blur. “That’s when I first felt that my experience and my diagnosis could be useful to others,” she says. From then on she positioned her center as inclusive, welcoming both typically developing children and those with disabilities. Entrepreneurship, for Meruyert, did not start with a business plan. Her individual entrepreneur (IE) was opened almost accidentally, at her brother’s request — he needed a registration to sell goods in a shop and could not do it under his own name. “I just said, ‘Okay, I’ll open it under my name,’ and I did,” she laughs. Later, when she wanted to formalize her own work, that random decision became a lucky foundation. She now had the legal status to sign contracts, apply for grants, and grow.
After quarantine she decided to open her own center. There was no capital, no savings. Near her house stood an old building of the Blind Society, a leftover from Soviet times. The rent was modest, 30–40 thousand tenge. The space was in bad shape, but her husband, friends and relatives came together with paint, tools, and time. The walls brightened; tables appeared; children started to arrive. “Everything was going well,” with her husband and children, waking up when they wanted, eating breakfast together, taking walks and picnics. “It was a wonderfully warm time,” she remembers. “I thought, ‘Why didn’t I choose this as my main work before?” Her illnesses eased; the constant inflammation and fatigue simply faded. This was the first quiet turning point: her heart telling her where it actually felt at peace
The growth came with lessons. She remembers worrying intensely when rent was due and money was short. For a week she was anxious, thinking about borrowing. Then she simply phoned the landlord, explained, and heard, “It’s okay, if you’re late, no problem.” The solution had been a two-minute conversation. “Sometimes the solution is right nearby,” she reflects. “We’re just afraid to ask.” When noise conflicts arose with a neighboring music studio, she agonized over construction costs until discovering that her own neighbor was a builder with leftover materials. He built a wall and allowed her to pay later. Again, the circle of support widened when she dared to name the problem. Behind the scenes, a web of kin and friends holds her up. Her husband is “very understanding and doesn’t expect me to handle all the household duties.” Her mother, who does not work, picks the children up from school and kindergarten. Her brother, neighbors, and friends fix computers, hang posters in the evenings when she is shy to advertise in daylight, and clean new premises before opening. “Moments like these are very important — you feel the support, realize you’re not alone,” she says. Her business is not a story of a solitary hero but of shared will, a collective will that keeps her going when her body says “stop.”
Systemic barriers appear more in the shape of bureaucracy and design flaws than overt discrimination. She has faced no direct refusals or hostility, and in Talgar, where many visually impaired people live, attitudes are generally calm and accepting. In fact, her status sometimes opens doors: the Employment Center extended youth internship support once they learned she was an entrepreneur with disabilities, and local sponsors supply New Year gifts and busy boards for children “without asking for documents, just because they want to support.” But she is clear-eyed about the limitations of current programs. Small grants of one to one and a half million tenge, with heavy reporting requirements and no allowance for rent, “aren’t very effective for beginner entrepreneurs with disabilities,” she argues. Competition is fierce; paperwork is mountains; and many businesses slowly suffocate under rent and salary costs. Larger grants, like the seven million she later won for her inclusive English methodology, feel genuinely transformative: easier reporting, online systems, real opportunity to invest in interactive boards and equipment. She dreams of policies that couple funding with strong training and mentorship, and of unused Soviet-era buildings renovated and offered to small businesses on low or zero rent.
Over time, Meruyert has rebuilt not only her center but also herself. She used to burn out regularly, arriving home so exhausted she could not move, torn between guilt toward her children and obligations to students and her new PhD program. “I used to think I had to do everything myself, as if no one could handle it the way I could,” she says. Gradually, through lectures, training and painful experience, she learned to delegate: one teacher manages Instagram, another handles parent communication, someone else takes payments, and a young accountant deals with taxes she openly dislikes. She writes problems down on paper, breaking them into pieces. When the pressure spikes — headaches, rising blood pressure, or emotional overload — she now allows herself to cancel a meeting, stay home, cook, clean slowly, or just sit in silence listening to meditations on YouTube. “Sometimes you just need to stop, sit, think, and everything becomes clearer,” she says. Entrepreneurship has also reshaped her sense of identity. As a schoolgirl she longed to be class leader but could not say the words “choose me.” At university she stayed silent when she wanted to speak. She did not know how to refuse requests, even when they drained her. Now she says, “I can clearly say what I want. I can take initiative, I can refuse if I feel I can’t handle it. And I really like it — feeling more confident and brave.” Her disability, once a source of hidden complexes, occupies less and less space in her mind. People close to her know; others she no longer feels obliged to explain herself to. And there is an unexpected gift: on stage or in front of a group, she doesn’t really see faces. “I don’t see their reactions, so I don’t get nervous,” she smiles. Where others are overwhelmed by the gaze of a crowd, her blurred vision shields her, letting her aqyl (mind) focus on the message, her jurek (heart) on the children.
Her days now start around nine at the center. She teaches her own classes, then shifts into administrator mode: documents, grant applications, perstudent funding programs, coordination with NGOs for sports events and inclusive projects. In the afternoon she returns to teach, record videos, meet her team. Two evenings a week she attends PhD classes. Between it all she tries to carve time for her three children (thirteen, eight, and two years old) to talk, walk, and ski in the nearby mountains. She dreams of contracts with the British Embassy and InterPress, of taking students to international competitions and summer language camps, of one day building a network of schools. But success, for her, is measured less in scale than in the faces of children who win contests, raise test scores, or simply start speaking confidently in English or Qazaq. “For me, success is primarily my students’ results,” she says. When she advises other entrepreneurs with disabilities, her words weave together mind, heart and will. First, educate yourself: understand finances, marketing, management, not only theory but practice. Second, do not put your disability on a pedestal, expecting the state to solve everything. “Use all the opportunities offered by the government and organizations, but don’t depend on them,” she insists. Apply for grants and loans, but also have a plan B for moving forward on your own. And finally, she reminds them gently that it is all right not to manage everything at once, that rest is part of work, and that solutions often appear the moment you dare to ask for help.
Looking back, she would change many tactical decisions, she laughs at how much money she once spent on new furniture in a space she knew had heating problems, but she would not undo the path itself. Her life as an entrepreneur has turned a quiet, partly sighted young woman who doubted her right to lead into a Tolyq Adam in motion: a person whose mind plans, whose heart includes children others overlook, and whose will keeps taking small daily steps toward a more inclusive future. In Talgar, in a bright center by the highway, children with and without disabilities gather around large-print worksheets and busy boards, learning languages and, quietly, learning that difference is normal. Through them, Meruyert’s journey becomes more than a business. It becomes a living lesson in how a person can move from survival to wholeness, and how one woman’s partial sight can open a wider vision for inclusion in Qazaqstan.