“I became blind when I was nine as a result of glaucoma.  Learning how to read something other than print, once I started learning brail, it became natural.  I learned brail music after that.  So all that seems very natural to me now.

I’m still a visual learner even though I’m blind.  So if someone says a word to me, I just think about the brail letters instead.

I have a chance to encourage others because I’ve been blind for a hundred years now.  Even yesterday I got a chance to encourage an elderly man who is newly blinded that blindness is not a bad thing.  It’s a nuisance but not a bad thing.

My mother especially has always said that, ‘There’s no experience lost…so you can learn from everything.‘  So even after I was newly blinded, she and my dad would just allow me to try things, to make mistakes and get hurt or whatever.  Not in an unreasonable way, but they did not necessarily shelter me.  They had the foresight to send me to a residential school for the blind when I was nine.  That had to be a tough decision for them at that time.  I received valuable training there in social things as well as academic.  Learning interacting and learning how to avoid mannerisms and things like that was just helpful to learn how to live in a sighted world.

The biggest thing I have learned is there are endless opportunities to educate.  All of us have assumptions about things that we don’t understand.  So in my case, I can explain things about blindness and maybe dispel some myths and tell some facts.  One would be that blind people are a lower life form.  Somehow they’re viewed as less than.  The standards aren’t held as high for us I think sometimes, and they should be.  The only difference is we cannot see.  Overall, just expect that a blind person can think and act normally.

I’m a person too.  I’m a normal person.

I’m not ashamed to say that the Lord understands our weaknesses and He lives in me and is a source of encouragement for me.  Because of that I can encourage other people.”

“You know my life’s been good.  I was born blind, so I didn’t miss it.  But life’s basically good.

I used to have a low self esteem, but I don’t now.  My friend talked to me about it and everything so I’m doing good.

I’m a gospel singer.  I’ve been singing for forty years.  I’ve traveled all over.  In fact I just came back from Arizona a couple weeks ago.  I’ve sort’a made this a career, you know.  And it’s something that I really enjoy and enjoy doing.

I will tell you about going to the Ryman Auditorium you know where the Grand Ole Opry and everything is.  I stood in the circle and I sang ‘Amazing Grace.’  Oh, that was a thrill!  That was just one of my dreams to do that.

Now let me think about a story in the Bible.  I guess you know the biggest miracle is the feeding of the five thousand.  You know how Jesus did that and how He had all that left over.  I mean that’s really something.

I do have a favorite verse.  Would you like for me to give it to you?  Well it’s Romans 8:28, ‘For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to His purpose.‘  Because I just feel like that things will work for your good if you just believe.  And that’s always been one of my favorite scriptures.

My favorite character in the Bible is David.  You know how, of course he kinda made that mistake you know, but God forgave him and everything.  He was a man after God’s own heart and all that.

I just want to say you know my main purpose is that why I sing, why I do this…it’s not a job.  It’s because I love God and I do it for Him.  You know to be a blessing to others and all that…that’s what I want to be.”

“Losing my vision was very scary, almost surreal.  I couldn’t believe it was happening to me…still can’t.  We all get down.  We all complain about our lot in life.  We all wonder why it happened to us.  You really have to bolster each other up.  When you’re up, you gotta help everyone else get up.

You really miss your vision.  You lose a lot of freedom.  All you do is sit around.  You have no purpose in life.  When you get up in the morning you’re like, what am I getting ready for?  Why do I put on make-up?  There’s nobody here to get ready for and there’s no reason ‘cause I‘m not going anywhere.  But you force yourself…you physically have to force yourself to overcome it.  It’s mind over matter.

People that are willing to help and support you and help you hold your head up is a good encouragement.  Your family comes to the rescue, which you never knew until you needed it.  My son, who’s eleven, it has been incredible for him.  It’s made him more understanding.  He’s very sympathetic.  It’s really helped him emotionally and maturity wise.  He handles this great!

I have totally grown.  I am much more accepting.  You know you think that you’re open-minded, you’re a good person, and you treat everyone the same…you don’t.  And then you realize now that you’re handicapped and see how people treat you, it really opens up your mind.  You’re more accepting, understanding, sympathetic of other people.  You’re open to everybody.

People that aren’t blind or visually impaired don’t get it.  They think they do…but they don’t.  I know I didn’t, but I thought I did.  Until you live it, you don’t get it.  Just like I don’t understand how my parents feel ‘cause I’ve never had a blind child.  Likewise, they don’t understand what it’s like being blind.

It was a real joy to bring my son to Camp Dogwood last summer.  It gave us time to spend together and bond.  It also gave him the opportunity to see others like Mom, to see that they got around fine, they had great attitudes, and everything was working out for them.  It gave him hope.”

“I developed diabetic retinopathy in 2009.  I guess it’s from my diabetes being out of control for so long.  I had lost my insurance in 2005.  Diabetes just set in from there.  I just slowly started losing sight.  Right now I guess it’s at a point where it’s not going anywhere.  It is just what it is and is gonna be for the rest of my life.

Before that I was an animator, cartoonist, working at Nickelodeon and working kid games.  I did a lot of computer animation.  I did a lot of visual stuff, so it’s like…What do I do now?  So now I’m more of an advisor and producer kind of situation.  I talk with artists and try to get them into knowing what they need to do to succeed in the art field and the digital art world.

I remember being at Nickelodeon for a year and the show ended.  It was like…Well what do I do now?  I gotta find a new job.  So I went over to EA and the opportunity presented itself.  I really never stopped doing the work I do.  In a sense, I just adapted to what happened to me.

My mother, my brothers and sisters won’t let me get to a point where I’m like ugggh I don’t want to do anything today ‘cause I can’t see.  I don’t feel like doing anything but they push me.  My oldest brother is legally blind.  He says to me all the time, ‘I’ll allow you one day to feel bad and after that you gotta get up and go and keep going.‘  So that’s our motto.

Some people treat me differently now, some don’t.  Some people just see me as Mark, and that’s just how Mark’s always been.  And then there’s some people like, ‘You know we don’t really want to have to deal with looking out for you ‘cause you can’t see.‘  There are people like that.  And there’s other people that are like, ‘He’s our friend.  He’s our brother.  We ain’t gonna treat him any different.‘

“My vision is congenital.  My biggest challenge is the small things. Seeing small things, and getting people to understand that I can’t see small things.  I can’t really clean the house too well ‘cause I just can’t see it.

When I got pregnant, my mother wanted me to abort the baby because she didn’t think I could take care of it.  I’m proud to say I raised that child by myself for eighteen years.  She’s nearly nineteen years old.  My biggest encouragement is that I have raised my child on my own on a fixed income with a disability like this not being able to get around,.  You know, I managed.

When I was raising my child, she wasn’t able to have a lot of the fancy stuff growing up.  But you know, she had a roof over her head.  She had food to eat.  She had a bed to sleep in.  She had heat in the winter.  She had a cool house in the summer.  She had clothes on her back.  She may not have had the fancy stuff, but she had the stuff that she needed.

You know I guess people wanting to put me down, I always try and show ‘em you know hey I can do it!  I may have to go about doing it a different way, but I do it.  And that’s the biggest thing right there.  Regardless I can do it on my own.”

“I believe in Christ.  I believe the Bible, every word’s true.  I always believe that the Lord is with me.

I’m proud to have served my country.  I’m proud to be a Christian.

If I could regain my vision, I would want to see my family clearly and see the beauty of the world as it really is.”

“From birth everything for me is color contrast.  I can see a figure of you, but I can’t see your face.  I can see the shape of your face.

I grew up without a mother.  Step-mothers, every one of ‘em were essentially mean to me.  I never had a mother to bring me up right.  My dad was a partier, drank for forty-eight years.  I’m proud of him now.  He’s been sober for two years.

I knew about these support groups; but I always felt too proud, too good, and wouldn’t accept the fact I was visually impaired.  I went through that stage of why me, blamed God for everything, damned Him every chance I got.  I stayed angry for thirty-eight years.  Life’s too short for anyone to stay angry.

Then I got into this support group and started coming here (Camp Dogwood).  I can let loose and I can be me.  Everybody knows I’m the biggest clown.  I wanna make people laugh…that’s my goal.  You hear me walking around here singing and dancing around.  I finally let my guard down.

Never give up ‘cause I did at one time.  All these years I felt like I had to walk alone.  I was homeless for four and a half years…living under bridges, dumpsters, wherever I could find.  I really wanted to die.  I tried to drown myself in the Atlantic Ocean; that didn’t work.  I sliced my wrists; that didn’t work.  I’ve been stabbed in the back with a butcher knife.  I’ve been beat up by skin heads.  I got run over by a Chevy Tahoe on a four lane highway.  And I’m still walking today for a reason.  What that reason is I haven’t figured out yet, but I’m happy to know I don’t have to walk alone anymore.

I believe in God and God’s got me here for a reason.  I know that I’m not where I need to be as far my relationship with God.  And I know that!  But, I have my own personal relationship with Him.”

“I was born with a visual problem.  I was cross eyed until I was six and I developed a lazy eye.  What I have now is macular degeneration.  It runs in the family and is hereditary.  I have two sisters.  It comes to the light eyes first and mine are blue.  The next sister it hit was green and my older sister has brown.  So all three of us suffer the same disease.

My career consisted of law enforcement.  I was a dispatcher before 911.  I was there when 911 was implemented.  I was a matron in the jail.  I worked a very strange shift, but I loved it.  I worked two swing shifts, two graveyards, and a day in that order for twenty years.  But I adapted to that.

It was a small county jail.  We had repeat customers.  The girls would come back every year for the same things either bad checks or drugs or driving while suspended.  But you could find year after year the same girls in there.  They memorized my birthday.  One time I was coming down the hall, and they could hear the jingling of my keys.  They lit a candle (a match) in the center of a cupcake.  That was my birthday cake from them with a card signed by all of them.  You’re not supposed to become that acquainted with the inmates, but these were local girls.  You know they made a mistake, but they are still human beings.  I treated them as such, and they liked that.

My children transplanted me.  I am from the West Coast.  I was perfectly content but there was nobody that was blind there.  So I was a minority and nobody understood my problem.  When I came here, there were so many blind people.  I envy all of their abilities.

I am learning so much from them.   Seeing people that are totally blind, I watch them and I think….if they can do it, I can do it.  There are things they are teaching me how to do.  I still can see enough to get myself in trouble, but I will be prepared if it totally goes away.

Totally blind people deal with it on a daily basis, and they deal perfectly.  It doesn’t matter what the challenge is, they will take it on.  If they can’t do it, they’ll just keep trying or get some help.  The one thing about it is they will ask for help, but they won’t ask for help until they really, really need it.  I think it’s taught me a lot.  Try everything!’

“I’ve really had limited vision since ’08, but I more or less try to be too independent, I think.  [laugh]  I like to do things on my own.  I get frustrated when people take over, you know when I’m tryin‘ to do somethin‘ and they do it for me.  I don’t like that. [laugh]

A lot of times I’m trying to do something and I get real frustrated.  Then I say well Lord, You said You would help me.  Then all of a sudden I know how to do it with the help of the good Lord.

Family, particularly my grand and great grands…well I better not leave my daughter out, she’ll kill me…  [laugh]  they really brighten up my life and give me a lot of inspiration to live a full life.

When my great grands are down, they just brighten up the world.  I just sit and look at them and just revert back to how I enjoyed life as a child and teenager.  So that gives me that smile to give them to let them know that it’s okay.

I mean, the young one always says ‘gran…how old you be?‘   When I tell her,  she’s like  ‘Oh my God you’re old.‘  I’m like that’s okay honey.  That’s fine because if you keep living, you’re gonna get old.  [laugh]  So it’s okay.”

“I was fifteen years old, and I met him at the dance.  I was shy…and I was scared.”

“We’ve been married for seven years.  She does the line dancing‘…I do the slow.”

“I have macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetes.  A couple months ago I lost my vision completely.  I woke up one morning and my whole world was rocked.  I went from seeing to nothing.  I had surgery, and for three days I could see with no glasses.  Then on the fourth day when I got up, my world was rocked again.  The only thing I saw was milk.  I mean it was just milky…I couldn’t see anything.  I saw what a person that was totally blind really went through.

I can tell there’s a person in front of me but I can’t tell nothing about you.  Sometimes when we see people, we’re quick to judge them by their outward appearance, whether that’s good, bad or in-between.  But since I’ve lost my vision, I’ve learned to listen to people.  If you’ll listen, they will tell you what kind of person they are…and that leads me to their heart.

In pastoring I’ve told people don’t sit around telling people you know what they’re going through unless you’ve been there…until you’ve walked in their shoes.  Otherwise you’re just blind.  You just don’t really know.  I’ll be honest with you, as a kid I used to joke around with some of my friends.  Let’s park in a handicap and you lead me in like I’m blind.  Guess what [chuckle] ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’  So today I get to park there and have to be led in.

There’s nothing that happens in my life and there’ll be nothing happen in your life that God won’t have a reason in it.  There’s a purpose in everything.  Good, bad or ugly…there’s a purpose in it.  There again that’s when you have to see things through a different vision.  I see things out of a different set of eyes than what I could when I could see with my natural eyes.

My eyesight might be bad, but my vision’s 20/20.”

“I was born with a rare condition called Achromatopsia.  I have peripheral vision but no central.  I see better in the dark, and I don’t see any colors.

My biggest challenge is finding a challenge.  But now, I would say my biggest is cross-country skiing.  I’ve been doing that for ten years.  So, you know, I mean I live in the south so how often do I get to.  There’s no cross-country skiing.  So I go once a year and ski with a group of blind skiers.  We just got back from Alaska.  I represented the United States in Norway in 2007.  We sent two skiers, and they sent me to represent the U.S.  I’m not good at skiing…I’m really good at falling down and getting up.

My grandmother was a woman ahead of her times.  She went to college in the early 1900’s when women didn’t go.  She’s always been an encouragement for me because she said, ‘You can do anything you want.‘  You know I can hear her…she still tells me that.

Keep going.  Don’t stop.  Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.  That’s what you do…just keep moving.”

“Never give up.  You can always accomplish your goals if you don’t give up.

I had a stroke that affected my vision.  Well the stroke didn’t really…about a year later they put me on medicines and that’s when I lost most of my vision.  In fact it was worse than this but some of it came back.  Everything I saw was just as white as that white wall.  Then some vision started coming back slowly.

I’m just happy-go-lucky, that’s all, ‘cause I get up in the morning.  Just about all my life I’ve been like that.  You know I think it’s mostly from my mom ‘cause she was always like that all the time.  So I just keep my joy.

When I laugh and joke and carry on for other people, that helps them.  So I feel the way I act helps other people to handle their situations.  When I was in the hospital, the nurses thought I was crazy ‘cause I kept them laughing all the time.

Being blind you have to depend on other people, you know.  I had some pretty good church people so they help me out.  They took up the slack, know what I mean?

There’s been people in my church, by the way I act, they kinda look up to me, you know.  That makes me feel good…in my spirit and more.  When I help them, it helps me too.”

“I lost my vision and went totally blind in ‘92.  It started when I was thirteen and I went completely blind at seventeen due to multiple sclerosis.  Just being able to adapt, you know, having vision and then losing it was quite a change.  But I handled that well, [laugh] I mean quickly, not well, but quickly.  I’ve been able to raise children, two on my own by myself being totally blind.  That was a big challenge but I did it.

My children were my driving force.  I had them and knew I had to stay strong because I knew they were dependent on me.  I was basically their mother and father.  I just kept pushing.  I didn’t let anything discourage me.  Sometimes I got a little sad.  But meanwhile everybody’s like I got that smile and you’d never know I was sad because I never let it get me down.

When I get overwhelmed I fall back and get my strength from God.  That’s basically where I get my strength from.  When I get weak, I just ask for strength from God through Him.  And then support comes from my family and friends.  Friends and family let me know that there’s a light at the end of that tunnel, you know.  At the end of the day, there’s someone that’s still gonna be there to encourage me.

Since I was a little, little girl [laugh] I was in church.  I was raised in church.  My faith got even stronger after I lost my sight.  I never left the church.  When I started losing my vision, I just kept thinking I didn’t want to lose my vision.  But I lost my vision with my face in the Bible reading it.  But I kept on just staying in the Word and you know going to church.  I didn’t want to go astray because I felt I would gain strength from those that could encourage me.  And mainly I’ve encouraged other people in church ‘cause that’s where my faith was…in God.

No matter what your situation is, no matter what obstacles you are going through, put your hands in God’s hands and know He will help you through.  No matter what you go through throughout your day there is nothing too hard that God can’t help you get through.  That’s one thing I can tell you!”

“Around 1995 I found out I had diabetic retinopathy.  Um, I didn’t know I was a diabetic.  My mother was a diabetic, but I never thought about myself being diabetic.

Oh, it’s not been bad at all.  I’ve been blessed.  I got some of my vision back, um back in 2009.  Medically when they look inside my eyes, everything’s the same.  But in 2009 I was in a play at my church.  I played the woman with the issue of blood.  In the Bible it  says she had this issue of blood and the doctors said there was nothing they could do.  She’d gone to everyone that she could except for Jesus.  She went to Him and touched the hem of His garment and was restored.  Well, my vision came back!

When the doctors look in my eyes they say there’s no change.  In fact, there’s a hole in the retina in both eyes.  I shouldn’t be able to see.  And I can’t explain it.  You know all I can say is something happened, and it can’t be medically explained away.

With losing your vision, you lose your freedom.  You turn into a five year old, you know real quick.  I don’t let it bother me.  When I’m in the store if I cant find something, I’ll say, ‘Can I borrow your eyes for a minute?  I’ll give ‘em back as soon  as I’m finished.‘  And they just look at me like I’m nuts, but [laugh] you gotta keep a sense of humor.  You know what doesn’t make you bitter makes you better.

When I lost my sight, my husband after twenty eight years didn’t want to deal with the blindness. Um, he replaced me with somebody else.  But, I’m happy and I’m content.  Somebody said, ‘You ‘otta get married.‘  Nah, I think I’m waiting for that good Jewish boy that walks on water and performs miracles.  [laugh]  I think He’s a pretty cool guy.  I think he can deal with this.  [laugh]

You take what God gives you.  You use it to bless other people or to enrich your life.     That’s what I do.  Use it for the best advantage you can use it for.  Remember not to let a day go by without being grateful for what God’ s given you.

My blindness was the best thing that ever happened to me… if that makes any sense?  Maybe not to all people, but it allowed me to see things in a different way than normal.  I’m more in tuned with things, more sensitive to other people, more caring.  It just helps you to tune and listen, to be compassionate to other people.  We sometimes forget that in society.”

“I have macular degeneration.  I guess I was in my seventies when it started.  Now I can see you’re there, but I can’t see your features or anything.  Last year I could see facial features.  Now I’m lucky to see heads separate from the body.

In the beginning what happened was I wasn’t seeing good enough to stay in my lane.  I was crossing over into the lane next to me on old back roads out in the boondocks.  Um, that’s not so good. [laugh]  The day I found out, I did it three times on the way home from church…way over on the other side before I realized I was there.  So I decided not to drive anymore.  Then I went out and did some screaming outside for a while.  [laugh]

I felt very sorry for myself.  I went through a period where I kept feeling sorry for myself.  Then my social worker talked me into coming to camp.  I met people who of course couldn’t see anything.  One man couldn’t see light and yet he was baking his own sweet potatoes and fixin‘ some of his own food.  I thought if he can do that and he can’t see light, I better not feel sorry for myself.

I still have pity parties, I do.  I have some self pity parties, but I try not to have them when anybody is around.  [laugh]  I just have myself a good bawlin’ session and get it over with.  But life can be joyful, especially when you have a family that loves you and helps you.

I wanted to plant potatoes this year.  Of course I can’t see the difference between a weed and a plant anymore.  [laugh]  So, my son, he cut potato up for me and he planted it for me.  Just recently he harvested them for me.  [laugh]  So I had my little garden, but I didn’t have a thing to do with doing any of it.

I find that lately, I find myself just sitting there staring into space.  I gotta break myself of that.  ‘Cause that can get very bad, very habit forming.  Then you go down hill, and you get depressed.  Oh, I don’t wanna do that.  Life is too short to go through it depressed.

Keep your life interesting.  Keep activities that you can do that stimulate your mind.  And try not to be around depressing people ‘cause depressing people can pull you down into depression…if you’re not careful.”

“I used to drive a school bus.  Every time I see someone riding a school bus, I get, uh, I don’t know what the word is… it’s um, like I used to do it…. and now I can’t do it no more.  I get teary eyed ‘cause I used to do it, ‘cause I want to do it again.

I got two girls and four boys.  My baby girl, she the one that tells me, ‘Momma, you can do it.’  You know, just keep tryin’ to push me to do stuff that I think I can’t do.

When I got sick, she always… she was there with me.  And when I couldn’t see to take my bath, she would take to, you know, make a quick bubble bath.  She take care of me and do my hair and stuff.  So she wanted me to look, look nice.  I know she wanted me to look nice ‘cause I think she used to look nice, you know, like a princess.  So she gotta make her momma look special.

She’s like, when I want to do somethin’ and it seems like I can’t, she don’t make me.  She just keeps encourages me, I can do it.  I can do it!  Then I try and find out I can do it, yeah, she’s my baby girl.

I just thank God that I can wake up another day.  I go to church every Sunday and every Bible study.  They make sure I get to church.  I survive on being there.  You won’t keep me from goin’!  You know I love the Lord, so I keep stayin‘ in church.

‘They that wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength.’  God is God.  There is no other one!  I gotta trust Him.  I don’t trust in nothin‘ else.  I trust Him ‘cause He’ll do just what He says He’ll do.  He wakes me up every mornin’.  When I wake up and I breathe, I know that God’s got his hands on me!”

“When I enlisted in the army, my father said, ‘I’m going to tell you two things, duck, and the second thing is, choose your lane, stay in it.  Don’t change lanes just because somebody else does.  Choose what you want to do.’  I followed that advice and became one of the best snipers in the army.   I spent 26 years, almost half of my life in the military.  If I was still able, I would still be in the military.

I’ll turn sixty soon, and I have been healthy my whole life.  I lost my eye sight about five years ago.  So to have this happen is quite a shock.  I mean I was wounded while I was in the military, but nothing that was life threatening.  So this was hard to go through, it really  was.

This eye’s not real, it’s fake.  My artery collapsed on the vein going into the eye and caused a blood clot that pushed against the optic nerve so I can’t see.  And now that’s what’s happening to the other eye.  So in April they’ll remove this eye.  I’ll be totally blind.

Four years ago at the rehab center I met a guy who was not only blind, he was deaf.  He’s been that way his whole life.  But he, he had the greatest attitude, you know.  Here’s a guy who has never heard a bird, he’s never seen anything on TV, yet he had such a great attitude.  So that got me thinking.  I backed up and I said, ok these are your choices.  What are you gonna do now?  This is all you got to work with.

My thing right now, my inspiration, is being able to help other people and get them to a point where they accept hey, I’m blind, I’m not disabled.  That’s the way I try to live my life now.  My goal is to not let other people who are blind sink into that dark place that I went to.

I’m president of my Lions Club.  I started a National Federation for the Blind Chapter and I’m the president of that.  I sit of the board of the NFB.  I sit on the governor’s board for the deaf and blind for the state of North Carolina.  I just recently was sworn in as the state and district chair for Camp Dogwood.  The key for me is just to stay busy.  That’s the most therapeutic thing for me.

The one thing I’ve learned is I won’t let my blindness define who I am.  I don’t give up and I don’t say can’t. I just don’t.  I just don’t do it.”

“I was born premature.  They gave me oxygen in order to survive and it damaged my optic nerves.  I’ve been blind all my life but I just try not to let it slow me down.

I was adopted when I was three years old.  When I went to my mom’s and my dad’s, I knew how to do nothing.  I drank out of a bottle.  I’s still in diapers.  My mom taught me everything.  Learning how to cook, uh, unfortunately my mom was afraid I would get burned.  She didn’t teach me how to cook, but she taught me everything else.  She had to have the patience of Job, and I appreciate that so much.  And um, there’s plenty of times I wanted to give up, and my momma wouldn’t let me.  She would not let me just give up.  If I were to give up today, man she’d be turnin‘ over in her grave and coming back to haunt me.

You know, when I hear somebody say, well I can’t do it cause I can’t see, first of all I don’t get angry, but it makes me disappointed.  Because they, um you know, they might not be aware that they can learn to do things.  You learn many different ways, just like I did raising my two boys.  So when I hear somebody say, well I can’t do it cause I’m blind, I try to encourage them, yes you can.  There are ways to learn and there are support systems that will help you.  In fact I used to work for a place that, um had that kind of support.  So I know it’s out there.

I think one of the greatest, well besides my two children being born and seeing them, I think my greatest thing was, uh, I played the clarinet in the school orchestra.  My senior year I got the highest award that anyone could get.  Technically, you had to be able to read music, which I don’t, I play it by ear.  But, I still got the highest honor and I got an A plus, which the teacher never give anybody else.  So that really, really made me feel good.

And um, I think that, I’m blessed everyday, just being able to wake up, get up and do things, even if its just sitting there reading, or you know just chillin’.”

“I had 20/20 vision but lost it in ’97.  I lost my whole sight, my complete sight.  It started like in mid-May and by mid-July I was completely blind.

But God ain’t never let me down.  He hasn’t let me down yet.  He’s the one that’s got me where I am now and keeping me going, you know, so He’s everything.  God is everything.

God gave me my kids.  I’m making sure since it’s just me and them, I’m taking care of them, doing what I got to do for them.  I can do without myself, you know what I’m sayin’, but I just make sure they got.  God is providing.  He is the provider.  He is everything, all I need.  Where I try to depend on people, they tell me they gonna do this and do that.  When the time comes for it to get done, they are nowhere to be found.  God, He’s always there.  He makes it happen.  He makes things happen.

Look, I am here and I am raising my two kids by myself.  Now, what better example do you need?  We don’t need nothin’.  What we need, God provides.

Nothing is bad enough to just give up.  If you give up, that’s the end.  But if you keep trying, there’s always something to reach out for, always, always something.  It may not be much, but it’ll be more than you had.  Always think positive.  The mind is where all your troubles come from.  Can is a positive word.”

“I don’t see challenges.  I see opportunities.  They are opportunities to push on and press forward.  You just keep going.

No matter what you encounter in your life, anything that is done here on this earth is um, it’s beautiful.  And so it may not be beautiful in the sense that you can get rid of what the problem is, but that it gives you an opportunity to work it out and learn how to work it out so that when somebody else has the same problem, you know, you can help them out.  And for that reason I say it’s an opportunity.

I’ve learned so much since, since I lost my sight.  I consider myself blessed, in a way, that I see people from the inside to the outside instead of from the outside to the inside.  That’s what I learned when I lost my sight.”

“When I was three months old, they diagnosed me as being blind.  They said, it was basically from damage to the optic nerve.  And I’ve been blind ever sense.  But, that doesn’t define who I am.  It’s not a disability.

From the time I was three, I was in preschool.  My parents decided that they were gonna raise me as like normal kid.  I was gonna do the same things that my sighted friends were doing.  Not being raised any differently than a sighted person, has really helped me in life, and has gotten me to where I am today.

My parents encouraged me to do anything and everything I wanted to do.  I mean, you know, when I was in eighth grade my parents were working the concession stand at my brother’s baseball game and I was in there, you know, I was helping.  But for some reason, to this day I still don’t know what it was, but I heard the guy announcing the players’ names.  And I was like, you know I want to try that.  So I went up there and I was like, can I announce one batter?  One batter is all I want to do, I just want to see what it feels like.  So he let me announce a batter, and then he said, I’ll read names out to you, the job is yours.

And then from that point on, up through my senior year of high school, I was the public address announcer for all of our home baseball games. Once I got into high school, I traveled with the baseball team keeping stats and things like that.  It’s like I’ve always said, sports to a blind person, unless the games are somewhat adapted, they can’t play ‘em.  No blind person would ever play baseball in college, because the game is too fast.  They can’t modify it that much.  But there are ways for a blind person to participate.  To be able to say, I participated in a high school sport is really a neat thing for me.

I didn’t really have that many friends in high school, but when I got to college, I made it my goal from day one to get out and meet people.  And in college, they don’t mind.  You know by the time you get to college you understand, hey this kid is visually impaired, but in reality he’s just a normal person.  There’s nothing different about him versus me, except I can see and he can’t.  Lets hang out with this guy, ‘cause he’s really cool.  The people in college understood that, and that, that was huge to me.

The biggest thing that I would say is, keep battling.  You know, because, if you put your mind to doing something you can do it.  And, if you think you can do something, but people tell you that you can’t, you can still do it.  If you wanna do something, or think you can do something, all you gotta do is put your mind to it.  Nobody’s gonna feel sorry for you.  Nobody’s gonna do it for you.  If you want it, you gotta go out and do it.  You gotta do the dirty work.  But without confidence in yourself, you can’t do it.

Who would have ever thought that a blind person could call baseball games.  But it happened.  You know, most people don’t think a blind person can do a job, but they can.”