On the Blind Side

By Lynda Smiley

On the blind side is an account of the rehabilitation of some of the men and women Lynda has trained when they lost their sight either through accident or illness or on the battlefield. They are all heroes.

Theirs are stories of bravery and courage, of hope and fulfillment. Arriving at the Enid Whitaker Rehabilitation for the Blind at a crisis point in their lives, often suicidal, always downcast, they departed on completion of their course full of new ambition to conquer the world.

Running in tandem with the stories of the rehabilitees are brief vignettes from Lyndas own history, glimpses into how she came to take up the work she did.

The contents include chapters such as:
In the beginningLyndas own background for doing the work
Clash of the Titians a case history of one of the students
Pancakes and snow...an account of optacon teaching
Too much sugar about Diabetes Mellitus

The book should appeal to the general reader, to those facing impending loss of sight, and those who are already blind, as well as to professionals in the field of blindness. It is an essentially human story of hope and courage which Lynda had the privilege to witness many, many times in the course of her career as the first locally trained Mobility Instructress in South Africa.

Lynda was employed by the South African National Council for the Blind and later by St Dunstans for War Blinded Veterans.Today she freelances in the community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Feb 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482805741

Lynda Smiley

Lynda Smiley was employed by the South African National Council for the Blind and later by St. Dunstan’s for War Blinded Veterans. Today she freelances in the community.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Lynda Smiley.

For any comments or queries please consult the author, Lynda Smiley, at Telephone/fax in Johannesburg, South Africa: [phone].

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Toll Free 0800 990 914 (South Africa)

www.partridgepublishing.com/africa

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE: NEW HORIZONS IN REHABILITATION

HOW IT BEGAN

EARLY DAYS

LITTLE BOY BLUE

INTERLUDE: PANCAKES AND SNOW

TOO MUCH SUGAR

LADIES’ DAY

TRANSITIONS

THE CLASH OF THE TITIANS

BRIAN – RECOLLECTIONS IN TRANQUILITY

ABOUT BRODERICK: A FANTASY

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With gratitude I acknowledge the help I was given in the writing of this book. Above all I thank All Mighty God who sustained me and has blessed me beyond words throughout my life.

I thank those who paved the way – Gladys, Wally, and Ken.

I thank Dan who taught me to become a mobility instructress.

I thank all my rehabilitees who by their bravery, perseverance, and example provided the material for the writing of this book.

Annatjie has been a pillar of friendship throughout my career, as has Rodney who goaded me into writing of my experiences.

Olga, my octogenarian neighbour, inspired me to push on when daily a blank mind obstructed my progress, and Lee encouraged me by her passionate enthusiasm.

Paul has been a most patient computer teacher who helped with the mechanics of putting this book together.

My sister Sylvia loved and supported me without ever wanting to read what I was not yet ready to reveal.

To all of you I say a huge Thank You.

Rebecca Carter and the Design team at Partridge have all been most patient in answering all my queries.

To protect their privacy, the names of the rehabilitees, and sometimes the places they came from, have been changed. Sometimes, too, I have attributed several actions of several rehabilitees to one person. The names of all others mentioned are authentic.

PREFACE: NEW HORIZONS IN REHABILITATION

(Keynote address delivered at the 1984 Biennial Conference of the South African National Council for the Blind.)

It is difficult for me to talk about our rehabilitation work at the Enid Whitaker Rehabilitation Centre because of all the non-verbals, the intangible ingredients that spell out ‘rehabilitation’. I could tell you of braille and typing, spend half an hour on skills of daily living alone, and a whole hour on orientation and mobility, but that would not be telling of ‘rehabilitation’.

Any of us here in the hall today could go blind. I do not know how many here have diabetes or are accident prone or are due to have an operation which may just not have the happy results one would wish for. And if we were to lose our sight, gradually or suddenly, would that make us any less viable as persons? We should experience loss certainly – loss of independence, loss of the ability to laugh at ourselves, loss of self-confidence. Perhaps that is what rehabilitation work is all about.

Because we are all deeply committed to the idea of man being a dignified animal, capable of calling upon inner strengths, and, above all, one worthy of the love of All Mighty God, we can and do work with our rehabilitees as dignified individuals. Let me give you a few examples.

When Ria came to us, having lost her sight through diabetes, she could not inject herself or test her urine. It required patience to overcome her initial fears of doing these things for herself, but she learnt.

It soon became evident that Peter was a domineering person, prone to arousing the animosity of others around him. Yet he could not understand why nobody had ever liked him. Through social group work discussions he became aware of this trait and tried to learn to control it.

By the time Mary had completed her course, she could say she had learnt to pray again.

So what is rehabilitation all about? Certainly we try to enhance our rehabilitees’ abilities by teaching them the above-mentioned braille, typing, skills of daily living, and mobility. But it is much more than that. It is starting the morning with a loosening of the tongue and limbs when we do gym together, and it is hilarious laughter when Brian does a ballet burlesque. It is the Major urging his men to kick higher, to run faster. It is Sharon talking of running gym classes for the women in her neighbourhood when she returns to Malawi. Does this not spell the return of self-confidence?

Or what about braille? The instructor was convulsed when Emil tried to construct meaning from po ta toes. During a mobility lesson you have Ivan landing in the city because the Portuguese bus-driver could not understand that he wanted to get off at the Rosettenville bus-stop. Skills of Daily Living finds Stephen putting salt in his coffee instead of sugar, and in the evening round the supper table they can all laugh together when partially-sighted David tries to secrete blind Susan’s orange from her plate.

There are tears too, as when Sam hears that his fiance has left him because he has lost his sight, as Brad faces the future without having either a roof over his head or a job to return to. And there is the natural sadness that is felt when so precious a gift as sight is lost.

Who are our rehabilitees? (I know many dislike the use of that word, but rehabs is used as a term of endearment.)

Amy shot herself because she felt her boyfriend did not love her anymore. Today she is blind. Josh did the same because his parents had rejected him and he had no-one to turn to. Today he is blind. An army bullet did the job for Craig. Debbie needed to have an hysterectomy and came out of hospital blind. The ravages of diabetes are too numerous to require further elaboration here. Joanne was a premature baby whose sight later on was affected. Sara is blind because her parents carried an RP gene which was transmitted to her eyes.

They come from all walks of life. Leslie, the company executive with a Cambridge degree, Laurie, the financial manager, Delosh the housewife, and Greg the plumber; all ages, from Oom Chris who at seventy-plus wanted mobility lessons to Joel who at eighteen had not yet even completed his schooling.

And what do we offer them? I have twice already mentioned typing, braille, mobility, and skills of daily living, and of course all of these are important as practical skills that enable one to function more or less efficiently without sight. But they do not offer one one’s daily bread. Often we find that our rehabilitation work is undone because we cannot point the rehabilitees in the direction of a job. And so, as staff members, we all try to find employment for our students. We offer telephony at the Centre as a vocational choice, but not everyone can or wants to be a telephonist.

As a new venture we are exploring the field of massage. We help, by giving optacon training, to promote word processing and computing. We tell our rehabs of any new technological advances which may aid them in seeking employment of their own choice, like talking labelling machines and calculators. And we take them to university, if they are academically inclined, to discuss courses and their necessary modifications with prospective lecturers. We teach them how to get about on the campus. We show them how to take lecture notes. We read books onto audiotape for them.

Not all require jobs. With the housewife we will go to a supermarket to look at the various kitchen gadgets that could be adapted to her use. It is certainly not always necessary to use aids that are available specifically for blind people.

It takes four years of study and over a lifetime of experience to become a social worker, so it would be presumptuous for me here to tell of the contribution of our social worker to our rehabilitation team, yet her part is possibly the most important link in getting the rehabilitees back into the community. Certainly the rehabs can talk about blindness with her – its debilitating effects and the gains resulting from it, how it has affected the rest of the family, and what it means to be blind. But there is so much more. Often the social work periods are a special time for personal growth and development, a time for sharing both laughter and tears.

Speaking of periods, perhaps I should give a brief description of the structure of our rehabilitation programme. We begin every morning with a forty minute gym session and Kaffee Klatch. While either a staff member or one of the rehabs will lead the exercises, people are cautioned not to do more than they are able to do. It is most gratifying to note that he who was doing no more than five press-ups initially does thirty by the time he leaves the Centre. It all has something to do with mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body). After that each one disperses to his or her own class, since each rehabilitee has an individually planned time-table. By ten o’clock students will regather in the dining room for tea, and I have often wished I could be a fly on the wall to be able to listen to Brian boastfully recounting how he manipulated a dumb pedestrian into taking him right to the Carlton Centre, or to hear others moaning about the homework they have not yet done for typing and braille. Ten-thirty sees them back in class, and so the day progresses until three o’clock when we have some group activity. It may be craftwork, a visit to the SA Guidedogs Association or Tape Aids for the Blind, jogging at the nearby park, or a discussion lead by our social worker and myself.

Perhaps you have heard Ivan mentioning during a radio interview that for him the greatest benefit in coming to the Centre is the realisation that he has retained his individuality. That probably came to the fore during a group work discussion.

When rehabilitees first come to the Centre they have a two-week evaluation period, during which time we try to assess their needs, their strengths, their hopes. Bearing all that in mind we then plan an individual programme for each. Most need to be shown how to eat with acceptable table manners, but not everyone needs to learn the full braille system or how to type business letters. Some may need to go to the Low Vision Clinic for a full visual assessment, and, hopefully, will be able to get new glasses; others need to be registered at the Diabetic Clinic at the Johannesburg Hospital. It all depends on their expressed needs and desires.

For very many eventual employment is the main goal, and it is heartbreaking to have to tell some students that they have not passed the telephony assessment. What are their alternatives? Towards the end of their course the Placement Officer from the National Council for the Blind will come over to the Centre to interview them with a view to their future placement. His is an unenviable task.

Generally a course will last three to four months, but we have had people who were with us for as short a period as four weeks.

Perhaps to end I should mention some of the highlights that have made working at the Centre so meaningful for me. It was thrilling to be invited to the christening of Greg’s baby and to Amy’s wedding, and sobering to attend Norman’s funeral. I felt humbled when I heard Eric saying, Oh, is this what a bus-stop pole looks like? as his outstretched hands encircled the girth of the pole and I realised again just how much we who have always had our sight take for granted, and I was deeply moved when I heard the tremor in James’ voice as he read fluently, by optacon, from the print copy of My family and other animals. It was most satisfying to note the evident growth in Ferdy when we did a final evaluation of the course with him. He acknowleged that he had not been an easy customer, that he had a terrible temper and could not function efficiently when he was cross. For him to admit to such home truths was not easy. Max felt the other rehabs had boosted him when he was feeling low, Ellen felt her peers had helped to waken her from her coma.

When medical students and nurses come to tour the Centre it has been thrilling to note with what self-assurance and even pride the rehabs talk to them about their course. And so we have come full circle. Self-confidence is restored and the medics have been given new insights.

Because most of the staff members of the rehabilitation team come from a more or less faithful background, we are all aware of the presence of All Mighty God. Perhaps this communicates itself to the rehabilitees, and perhaps this is what rehabilitation work is all about.

CHAPTER I

HOW IT BEGAN

What I missed most in my childhood was having fun and playing with my parents. My father was forty-two years old when I was born, my mother ten years his junior. Theirs was not a love match, but a marriage of convenience forged out of the holocaust that was Germany in the thirties. By different paths both had fled from Germany to South Africa where they met and became betrothed in Johannesburg. Neither wanted to have children, having seen and read too much about the horrors of war. I was born five years after they had pledged their vows, my sister two years after that.

In later years, as I watched the antics of my contemporaries with their parents I always felt envious that I had been denied such merriment and bonding. Ours was a household of strict German upbringing, in which the spectre of Onkel Ludwig, the self-appointed patriarchal head of the family, towered over every action and major decision my parents took. ‘Children must be seen and not heard,’ ‘children obeyed their elders,’ ‘children emptied their plates at mealtimes,’ were the mottoes that ruled our home, and for fear of a spanking or otherwise incurring the wrath of her who must be obeyed we acquiesced and did as we were told.

Today, with hindsight, I know that my parents, especially my mother, did the best they could. Both had themselves sprung from impoverished circumstances and knew little about bringing up children. Fortunately we had our beloved Aunty Gretchen who softened every blow we felt at home. Loving to the very roots of her being, she cuddled us to her ample bosom and taught, by example, of gentleness, of integrity, of laughter. She taught us to pray.

Our dad passed on very suddenly when I was in my thirteenth year. By then I had just entered High School and had met my Mr Potter. It took two years for me to express my grief over dad’s parting, the meanwhile to try daily to outwit my mother. More and more I turned for solace to my books, imagining myself in the role of Annie Sullivan to Helen Keller. Today I am grateful that mother, the perfect Deutsche hausvrau, the embodiment of all I then eschewed, taught me to be systematic and methodical, and, most importantly, how to manage my finances. She herself had never had much money, yet she saw to it that both of her daughters could follow the professions of their choice, and for that we are extremely grateful.

We first lived in Muller Street, Yeoville, in a small semi-detached home where all was gloom and doom. The buildings were grey, the surrounding streets were grey, the pavement was grey, and if any weed dared to shoot up between the cracks, it too was grey. One entered our flat, as far as my faulty memory allows me to recall, into a darkly partitioned entrance hall. Behind the heavy curtain was a playroom for my sister and me where the light always burned. I cannot remember much else other than the kitchen at the end of a long dark passage. The backyard of the building seemed to be littered with scrap-metal, many dust-bins, and other such junk. Nearby a convent, mysterious behind its high grey walls, clanged its bell at regular intervals.

Then we moved to Cyrildene; a brand new house in a brand new suburb. We had a garden, green lawns, and a grapevine. Very lah di dah, my sister and I had our own washbasin installed in our bedroom. It was cleverly concealed in our clothes closet and avoided the early morning bathroom congestion. Our mother was a practical woman. I could cross the road to the Busy Bee Kindergarten run by Mrs Viljoen or walk safely down to the corner café for my weekly purchase of a tickey slab of Cadbury’s milk chocolate, the bounty of my pocket money. It did not take me long to become a chocoholic!

Soon I graduated from the nursery school confines and had to be driven to Observatory Girls’ School. My dad provided transport on his way to work. The most vivid recollection I have of that school is learning to thread a needle correctly. It took many hours of deep humiliation; a sarcastic teacher did nothing to bolster my waning morale. Sewing lessons were a weekly nightmare. Though I struggled to read fluently, I was in other respects a good pupil, and a very proud one on the day I was chosen out of the whole school to hand over a donation from the school to the mayor on Children’s Day.

I learnt to ride my bike in Cyrildene, wobbling bravely from our driveway onto the wide pavement of our neighbour and back to our house again. One day I lost my balance and crashed onto our coaldust-laden tarred driveway, which necessitated a trip to the Children’s Hospital for some stitches to my leg. I bear the evidential scar to this day. When the Cyrildene Primary School opened its portals I transferred from Observatory Girls’ and found myself for the first time in a co-ed class. Talking to boys mortified me. The shyness that was to hamper me all my life had manifested.

At that time my father worked as a commercial traveller for the great-uncles’ produce business. When he came home one day with a badly bruised face and his arm in a sling, having been assaulted at one of his customers’ stores, Uncle Simon invited him to transfer his allegiance to his office in Pietersburg in the Northern Transvaal.

(Sometimes I feel like a displaced person. Pietersburg is today Polokwane, the Northern Transvaal Limpopo Province, and my school, the Pietersburg English Medium Primary School, early on changed its name to Capricorn. Were all those painful years spent there a figment of my imagination?)

At first we rented the Gifter’s house, a rambling farm dwelling where JR of Dallas fame would have felt at home. A wide porch ran all round the house and wire mosquito screens covered every window. Very early every morning my sister and I walked –for miles?—across the veld to reach the civilised streets of Pietersburg and our school. The serene beauty of tiny wild flowers, dew bedecked, enchanted me, as did the silence of the vast open spaces. I had become a voracious reader by then, thanks to the timely intervention of Enid Blyton, and used to spend many stolen hours straining my eyes to read by torchlight under the bedclothes. Parental warnings of direst consequences did nothing to quench my enthusiasm –the Hardy Boys and Bobsey Twins, Nancy Drew and the Railway Children. While my peers, given the slightest opportunity, chattered in class, I sucked my finger and read, anything and everything. I became my teacher’s pet, a hollow victory. On the playground I was alone.

My parents bought the Greeve’s house. A hop and a skip across the road and over the fence and I was at High School. Now every morning I could read in bed to the very last minute before rushing off to school. For the first time I met the legendary Mr Potter whose influence on my life has been incalculable. Though I was often a most miserable teenager, shy, alone, bereft, my periods in Mr Potter’s classroom were intensely moving. He taught me to love the beauty of language, the romantic poets, the meaning of life. Already then I developed an urge to give back to even one other some of the riches he had given me. Why I should have wanted to do so for one blind pupil rather than a sighted one came about thus.

When I was about eight years old I listened enthralled to a beloved aunt telling of how her son had the previous evening treated a blind lass on her twenty-first birthday. He had presented to her a beautiful gold powder compact and twenty-one long-stemmed red roses before taking her out to a dance. Aunty Gretchen described the girl’s reactions to all this attention and I wanted nothing more than to meet this ‘wunderkind’. Even had such an opportunity arisen, however, I would have been much too shy to take it, though I too should have liked a knight in shining armour to carry me away on his white charger.

A few years later, Gladys Evans, the founder of the South African Guide-dogs Association, came to our school in Pietersburg to raise funds for her fledgling organisation by demonstrating her new found independence with her dog Sheena. So fascinated was I that I subsequently wrote asking her to give me the name of some blind girl with whom I could be a penfriend. For a few years Hazel and I were regular correspondents until she departed for the RNIB physiotherapy college in London and I returned to Johannesburg as a Wits student. In the meantime I had read Jane Eyre and had developed a teenage crush on Rochester; I also wanted to be someone’s Jane.

In my matriculation year I had often lain on our lawn with books to hand, supposedly swotting for the forthcoming examinations, but in reality gazing up and up between the fluttering, scintillating leaves of a nearby tree to the bright blue depths of the sky beyond. So moved was I by the beauty that I longed to be able to paint a word picture of it for a blind friend.