There are no ramps here or guide dogs. The ground is uneven and strewn with rocks, muddy in some places, gravelly in others. Even for those with perfect vision, it is difficult to walk without tripping. But somehow Mr. Ramathan does it, navigating the gullies and the slimy sewage ditches, the Pepsi trucks parked like boulders in the middle of alleyways and the maniacal bicycle taxis that zoom across the road without a moment’s notice. He was clipped by a car a few years ago. His right knee still hurts. But he keeps going.

Officials in Uganda’s blind community say Mr. Ramathan has become a hero to the estimated 500,000 Ugandans who are blind.

“Here is a man who is showing that blindness is not the end of the world,” said Francis Kinubi, chairman of the Uganda Blind Sports Association.

He said Mr. Ramathan was helping raise attention and much-needed money. This year the association will miss the Paralympic Games in Beijing because it did not have the $200 to begin the registration process, much less the money to cover the airfare, a telling sign of how few resources are available for disabled people in much of Africa.

Mr. Ramathan, who says he is either 36 or 37 (he does not know precisely), hails from Naguru, a poor neighborhood just outside downtown Kampala, Uganda’s capital. Naguru is known for its red-dirt hills, its zinc-roofed shanties and its fast hands.

Uganda has a strong fighting tradition, going back to the flamboyantly cruel dictator Idi Amin, who was a heavyweight boxer himself. And within Uganda, Naguru has produced some of the nation’s hardest hitters, like John Mugabi, known as the Beast, who fought in the United States and nearly beat Marvin Hagler; and Michael Obin, a national welterweight champ.

Countless other aspiring Naguru contenders skip rope, pump rusty iron and spar in dimly lighted cinderblock gyms that are squeezed between the shanties and that house all the often glorified nonglories of the boxing underworld: the saggy punching bags, the flattened noses and the oversize street kid dreams.