By Edie Grossfield, Rochester Post-Bulletin

(Editor’s Note:  The following article is from the Rochester Post-Bulletin of August 23, 2010.  Jan is president of our Rochester chapter and a member of the NFB of Minnesota board of directors.)

As a rehabilitation teacher for the blind, Jan Bailey teaches people who have lost their sight how to live independently.  That includes everything from how to read and write using braille to how to cook breakfast without seeing.

The Rochester resident was a rehabilitation counselor for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind for 31 years, retiring in December 2009 to start her own business.  Recently, Gov. Tim Pawlenty reappointed Bailey to the State Rehabilitation Council for the Blind, which provides information and makes recommendations to the State Services for the Blind.  This will be her fifth and final year on the council.

What were the primary issues you encountered working for the state agency?

I had probably anywhere from 50 to 70 customers in southeastern Minnesota, and they either wanted to retain their jobs, a few of them, and then most of them had lost their jobs because of loss of vision, or partial loss of vision.

How did you help your clients?

What counselors do is help them figure out "what am I going to do next?”  I helped them adjust to blindness training.  I helped them get adaptive equipment.  Maybe they need a little vision services, or they may need some counseling to help them adjust to their vision loss.

Is it sometimes difficult to work with people who are struggling with having lost their sight?

It can be.  A lot of a counselor's job is selling — selling a person on the idea that just because you lost your sight, or a lot of your sight, doesn't mean that you have to sit home and do nothing.  And sometimes that's a hard sell.  Because people are upset, and they're used to seeing, and they're used to doing things visually. It takes them a while to realize that you can do most of the same things you always did, but you have to do them in a different way.

Have you always been blind, or did it happen later in life?

Shortly after birth, I was in an incubator and given too much oxygen and it caused me to have what they now call retinopathy of prematurity.  At first they didn't know, but a few months later, my mother noticed I wasn't looking around and took me to the doctor and they told her.  This happened to about 50,000 babies before a doctor discovered you have to measure oxygen; you can't just give somebody a big dose.

And your own blindness made you want to help other blind people?

Yes.  I've always been blind, and I'm used to it.  But I do know from my own circumstances that I had good opportunities to get good training, and that made a difference in my life.  So, that's why I wanted to go into this field, because I wanted to help other people have those same opportunities.

What is important for the general public to understand about blind people?

Mostly that we're normal people and that we don't have better hearing and we don't have any ESP or any of that kind of stuff.  You know, a lot of people kind of think some things like that.  But we are a wide cross of society, so we're just like all the other people, but we don't happen to see.