THE BLIND AND JOB OPPORTUNITY

THE BLIND AND JOB OPPORTUNITY A paper presented to the 2012 convention of Redemption International for the Blind at Concorde Hotel, Owerri, Imo State. Good day ladies and gentlemen. It is again my lot to talk to you this year. I presume I did not bore you too much last time out and I shall attempt to do the same now. Last year, I talked to you about Braille, the system of reading and writing for the blind in the life of a blind person. Now you have learnt your Braille, you have all the qualifications that mean you should stop spongeing on your parents and start adding your bit to the family exchequer. Whoops! Noone will trust you enough to give you a trial run. All those application forms you learnt how to write in school, they seem like practice run for someone else’s future. It can be soul destroying. I speak from personal experience. You can type? Mrs. Stenographer, set that machine for him! You become an object of disbelief for the ten minutes the demonstration lasts! You think you are being interviewed when someone asks you, “Who put your clothes on for you this morning?” When they read back your immaculate typing, you feel the job is yours! Forget it. You have not done the examination. A vacancy has not been declared in your area of specialisation. And, as you dispiritedly walk away, your overbloated ego in your shoe soles, you hear someone say: as though being blind makes you deaf! “I mean, what can a blind person really do?” The answer is simple: work! The followup question: “as what?” I was tempted all those years ago to respond, every one seems to be chit chatting and walking about, I can at least manage that! But as I learnt working for Mr. Maury Bruce before I went to university, you need help to chit chat, walk about and do nothing. You see, whenever the boss shows up, everyone appears to be very busy! And, I had to learn in university that being an ordinary receptionist, you needed assistance, and it took years before the equipment came on the market for me, enthusiasm and all, to be a passable blind receptionist! Maury Bruce was kind: one typist can answer the phone, receive visitors and sort out mails: an eye, or better still, a couple of working ones would do the trick and save the firm an extra wage bill.And, in my innocence, typist: forget it, who would pay for the amanuensis! Not economic at all! That is where learning crafts comes into its own. Except that as Paul Caswell, past CBM boss in Nigeria once warned: someone has to buy the bases and canes, nails and varnish and market for you; which makes you cheaper than the Akwaibom lads who make your products prohibitively expensive! Not the fault of the teachers. In Europe and America, weights are weights, quality is quality and you can have it delivered by phone. Our good old marketplace, fun, happy, noisy and exuberant; the problem is you hassle, and defective merchandise is sold, caveat emptor is alive, well and kicking! Music! Music! Music. How many blind people have been compared to Stevie Wonder? Peter Jackson Et Al, when all they wanted was a simple no TV, no radio, no CD job? God has blessed us with endless patience, so we can say without loss of face: “You know Sir, the Almighty gave me other gifts”. However, in King’s College, I made a pretence of tinkering around the keyboard of a piano, so, when I begged Cliff Richards for his autograph some years later, I deceived myself into saying, “Sir, I can play the piano”. And, in a near whisper, I added truthfully, “A bit”! before the great Cliff would ask me to demonstrate to the Albert Hall crowd my incompetence! I was pleased when the great Cliff Richard said to me, I have no stylus to give you an autograph now! Good show, I had a stylus, but what would I have said if the famous music maestro could not write Braille like me inspite of his millions! Why am I talking about music? When I worked in a school for the blind, every child wanted to be a Stevie Wonder! Unfortunately, the tonic solfa was to them a waste of time, and instruments apart from the guitar and drums were noise. Back to the beginning, blind people need jobs. They need to go to school, they need qualifications, and most important, they need a guardian angel, who would give them a chance to be productive, who would pay for them to make those vital first erroneous steps without laughing or undue criticism. But you need certain basic skills: type; read and write Braille; get yourself good grades without aid of expo; and forget those beggarly attitudes; they make you feel dirty afterwards. There are other skills which can be taught in a halfway home. When the late Sani Abacha released money to all States to build halfway homes, no southeastern State built one. The money in the area was wasted on frivolities. How many of our libraries have functional units for people living with disabilities with more than the religious literature in them? Where can you get your Braillewriter repaired? Your typewriter serviced? Who will make your phones talk? Your computers talk? Or even work out the number of steps and direction to the toilets without embarrassments; begging for things you can do yourself? Most important, who will teach you how to smile when all the work you have done is illegible because your typewriter ribbon went kaput on for long? When talking to those in authority, I always appeal to them to remember Adam’s disendowed children. Written by: Anaba GCN.