Working blind in Des Moines: Changing attitudes about blind people the biggest hurdle

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When Eric Chamberlain’s world went dark more than a year ago, he assumed there wasn’t much he could do but sit at home and wait for his family to come home each night.

He began losing his sight about four years ago as a complication of diabetes. Literally overnight, he completely lost vision in his left eye. He still has some sight in his right eye, “enough to get me in trouble,” he said with a smile.

Getting to the point where he was ready to move on with his life was his biggest initial challenge.

“One day it just clicked: I’m 34 and I’m too young to do nothing,” said Chamberlain, who formerly worked as a community organizer for a non-profit social services group. “I’m the type of person who enjoyed going to work every day.”

For Chamberlain and two dozen other students currently enrolled at the Iowa Department for the Blind’s training center in downtown Des Moines, the biggest hurdles won’t be learning Braille or how to navigate city streets with a cane.

It will be finding an employer willing to hire them.

Persuading employers to interview blind people, let alone hire them, is very difficult, according to the agencies that work to place them.

“Historically, persons with sight impairments have always had a higher unemployment rate,” said Debbie Noe, marketing coordinator for Easter Seals in Des Moines, which assists people with blindness and other physical disabilities.

“Now especially as the economy is tighter, we’re competing with people that don’t have an impairment,” she said. “It makes it more difficult because it isn’t a level playing field.”

ATTITUDE, ATTITUDE, ATTITUDE

Allen Harris, director of the Iowa Department for the Blind, doesn’t hesitate to tell his clients how tough it will be. The department currently assists about 550 blind clients in various capacities. Last year it helped place 170 of them in jobs.

The department works with its clients to empower them with a certain mental toughness and the right training. But there’s an element that neither it nor its students can control, Harris said.

“It’s attitude, attitude, attitude. If I can’t change your attitude (about blind people), nothing else matters.”   Employers who have hired blind people have been “very satisfied,” Harris said.

Blind since birth from glaucoma, Harris followed his dream to become a high school teacher. He taught social studies for 20 years in the Detroit school system, followed by 10 years as a school administrator. He was assistant director of the New York Department for the Blind before coming to Iowa two years ago to head its department.

To break into teaching, he took an internship no one else wanted: teaching inner-city high school kids in Detroit. It still took him 14 months to land his first job in 1967, despite good grades and a severe teacher shortage.      “What we work to do is make 2003 different than 1967,” he said, “and really, different means to change attitudes.”

For one Des Moines woman, being legally blind has meant being “treated like a leper” by her former employers. To be able to read documents, she uses a special computer and program that magnifies type. It was an accommodation her last employer refused to make, she said.

“Even though I am functioning and performing, it takes me longer (to do things), said Donna Weese. “They just couldn’t handle it, nor did they want to.”      To be her own boss and not have to answer to employers about her vision, last year Weese and her husband, Ed, opened their own commercial kitchen supply store in West Des Moines.   Weese, who has enough vision to navigate through her store and help her customers find items, makes an effort to appear to not have any vision problem at all. She says it’s her way of trying to maintain normality.

“I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning if I thought about it too much,” she said.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain is upbeat about his plans, which are to return to college to finish his degree in education and become a high school or middle school teacher.

Being treated as a whole person is also important to Chamberlain, who is married and has two school-age kids and a toddler at home. His kids haven’t treated him differently since he became blind, he said, and that’s how he’d like to be treated in his professional life.

“I want them to assume I am capable of doing anything they can do,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen as, ‘Oh, there’s the blind person.’ Just like anybody, I’ve developed a set of skills. It’s just a matter of taking these skills and building on them.”

Chamberlain’s house happened to be on a Metropolitan Transit Authority bus route, and he’s found MTA to be “very friendly and accessible to blind people.”

“The bus gets me to 95 percent of the places I want to go,” he said.   He hopes to be able to teach in Des Moines after he receives his degree, but that will depend in part on the accessibility of the school to a bus route, he said.

“I plan to be able to compete with a sighted person,” Chamberlain said. “I don’t expect to get a job because it looks good to have a blind person on staff. I want to be hired because I’m good at what I do.”