By Susan Brueske

(Editor’s Note:  One of our goals in the National Federation of the Blind is to help rid blind and sighted people of common misconceptions about blindness.  One way to do this is to invite our sighted friends and colleagues to work alongside us.  In the following article, Susan Brueske, one of our new sighted members, relates her perspective on a cleaning day we held at our building in Minneapolis.  Susan wrote this report as an assignment for a course titled “Disability and Society” taught at Bethel University by one of our members, Kathy McGillivray. Here is how Susan describes what happened.)

On Saturday, April 1, 2006, I participated in the National Federation of the Blind’s (NFB) “Building Repair Day.”  As a result, I did not have a particular shadowing volunteer to observe, but rather a whole group of individuals with a disability. The majority of them are blind, but others have various degrees of visual impairment. There were also several other sighted individuals such as me; some of them are members of NFB or family members of an NFB member. Several other sighted men that came to help with building repair projects are co-workers of NFB member Justin McDevitt; they came to offer their skills and time and to learn about blindness. It reminded me of a neighborhood gathering we had at my house when my father was building a new garage: friends, laughter, teamwork and a lot of work getting done in a very short time.

I spent most of the day in the dining room cleaning woodwork and removing many years’ accumulation of cobwebs and dust from the heat registers which are behind a wood-paneled casing with intricate metal grillwork through which the heat radiates. Above these radiators are windows all the way up to the ceiling, almost like a full wall of 10-by-12-inch windows side-by-side.

Near my work area, a long table was filled with many buckets of water and piles of cleaning rags that were being handed out by Al Spooner. As people arrived, Al would direct them to different areas of the building for cleaning, according to what kind of task they would like to do. There were many opportunities for cleaning windows, polishing woodwork, vacuuming carpet, painting and more.  I got to chat quite a bit with Al and many others as they came in to choose their tasks and pick up their cleaning tools.

From 9:00 a.m. until 12 noon, I worked in the company of Charlotte Czarnecki, the NFB Metro Chapter secretary, who was polishing the wooden panels of the dining room, and Judy Sanders, who was cleaning the windows above the registers I was working on.  There was a constant stream of chatter and laughter among the three of us the entire time, nothing specific I can remember, but just enjoying each other’s company and friendship.  I probably spent more time observing them than doing my own job, partly because it was part of this assignment, but also because I was fascinated by how thorough a cleaning job they were doing without vision, for which I rely on heavily for cleaning and most everything else.  I noticed how I relied on my visual senses while they relied on their senses of touch and/or smell, depending on what task they were doing, and yet the end results were no different than if I had done all the work myself.  I had to ask myself “Why should it make any difference how a person does something, when the final outcome is the same as if I do it my way?”  It shouldn’t.  There have been so many times I have been too quick to jump into a situation and say, “Here – let me show you how to do that.”

During this time, Shawn Mayo joined us to dust the upper levels of the window panes with a long-reaching cleaning tool, and I was glad for the chance to connect a name of an “unknown person” I had on my email list to an actual person.  Shawn is the director of Blindness: Learning in New Dimensions (BLIND), Incorporated, which shares the building with the NFB.  They all had questions for me regarding my school, major, and future plans, and were so glad to have me as part of the group.  They also said they’d be happy to answer any questions I might have about them, living as a blind person, or about the NFB.  The combination of being able to ask questions without being afraid of offending anyone or of looking stupid, and being able to observe blind persons doing everyday things in ways different from myself only because I am fully sighted and they are not was a great learning experience!

At one point, Charlotte finished her dining room job and left to help out in another area of the building.  Judy asked me for help in determining what kind of “crud” was on a window because she couldn’t get it off and couldn’t identify what it was.  I saw that it was some kind of glue that would require a razor blade to scrape it off, so we made note of it for someone with the right kind of tools to fix later.  Within minutes I was asking Judy for help because the top of the register case wouldn’t stay up by itself and I needed someone to hold it up for me so I could clean the inside.  We got into talking about the “Disability and Society” class and my life and her life.  For many years she worked in an office at the state level, until budget cuts made by then-governor Jesse Ventura eliminated her job.  Judy is now retired, yet very active in NFB and other activities.  She told me that she did not think of her blindness as a disability, but as an inconvenience.  In observing the many blind persons working at various jobs throughout the building that day, I became more aware of how true that statement really is.  Not a single person was unable to do their job due to blindness.  They just did them differently than I, as a sighted person, would have done them.

Lunchtime was another opportunity to observe how “difference” is not synonymous with “disabled.”  We all pitched in a few bucks and ordered seven large pizzas.  When they arrived, they were lined up the length of a table and it was announced that, from first to last, the pizzas were sausage, pepperoni, Canadian bacon and pineapple, sausage and mushroom, and vegetarian.  I then spoke up that there were four cases of pop to the right of the refrigerator; from left to right they were Diet Coke, regular Coke, regular Sprite, and diet Root Beer.  With this simple information, everybody was able to independently help themselves to whatever they wanted by sense of touch, and afterwards they took their pizza and drinks to the dining room tables to eat amongst friends.  I found an empty chair at a table with Joyce and Tom Scanlan, Charlotte, Mary, and a few other men and women I hadn’t met prior to this work day.  I got to ask Joyce questions about her new reader and what she thought of it since she had had several weeks to become familiar with it since I last saw her.  She said she really found it useful, but she was still learning the new technology.  I also wandered over to sit and chat at a table where Justin and Gemini and others were eating, and also to a table where Al Spooner and Judy Sanders were sitting, in an attempt to get to know other people I hadn’t met before.  I noticed that many of those I had talked with at a previous meeting and throughout the morning recognized me by my voice before I even had a chance to announce who I was.  That made me feel so “at home” and “known” among friends instead of the “outsider” visitor I had felt like at the first meeting.  The constant chatter and laughter indicated to me that everybody was having a good time, and I can attest that a group of blind persons can wipe out a massive amount of pizza, pop, and mountains of homemade cookies as fast and efficiently as Bethel’s football team after a game—and very likely with much more organization and much less cleanup to do afterwards!

One thing I initially perceived as a barrier was the lack of Braille for identification of cleaning product containers.  I noticed that this was not much of a barrier at NFB because, by a simple squirt from a spray bottle or opening a container, each person could identify what the product was by its odor.  However, this would be a real barrier for a blind person trying to select the desired item from a store shelf where it’s not allowed to randomly open sealed containers to find the correct one.

My perceptions of others’ attitudes toward blind persons is that the blind are just “regular, everyday people” who happen to have a physical difference that is not disabling in the sense they need assistance to do the things we sighted people often assume one needs vision to do.  However, we were not out in general public view, so there was very limited interaction with persons without disabilities outside of NFB who would be unfamiliar with persons who are blind.  I did not observe any discrimination towards persons who are blind; neither did I sense any discrimination towards myself for being different than the majority in that I am fully sighted.  I felt so welcome and accepted, so completely at ease that it actually felt like being with a group of people who have been my friends for many years.

That evening, as I was reflecting back on my day at NFB, a question popped into my mind: “What if God’s design for humans had never included eyes or a visual sensory system?”  Blindness would be the normal human experience; eyes and sightedness would be unimaginable concepts.  People would still go about their daily business, be creative, productive, hold jobs, go shopping, clean house, and raise families—every bit as much as people, both with and without disabilities, do today.  EXCEPT that things would be done differently.  The outcomes would be the same; only the methods of reaching those outcomes would be different because our environment (i.e., buildings, schools, appliances, books, etc.) would be designed for persons with no visual capacity.  I have to agree with Judy when she says, “I don’t see blindness as a disability, but as an inconvenience.”  And it’s only an inconvenience because our society has been created predominantly by and for a visually oriented, sighted population.