Well, because I had a limited list of skills I wanted to brush up on, the school allowed me to attend for 30 days instead of the usual 9 months the other students were planning to stay.

On my list of blindness-skills I wanted to improve on were Braille reading and writing, living skills which included home management, and cane travel. What I will talk about in this post are my many challenges with relearning how to use a cane the right way.

My first challenge

When you are doing well in something, it is easy to assume that you don’t require any additional education. I had fallen into this trap. Basically, the reason I never felt challenged when I traveled alone was not because I was an accomplished traveler. But, I subconsciously avoided the activities that made me feel uncomfortable. Therefore, my travel world was quite small.

If I thought relearning cane travel skills was going to be easy, I was sorely wrong. The travel instructors at BISM are well aware of how their students avoid putting themselves into uncomfortable situations when traveling. It is the instructor’s job to make the students better travelers. Which means, putting the students into situations that are new to them. I had no idea how uncomfortable I was going to be.

Discovering when old tools stop working

When you have some remaining vision, you use it. Believe me on this one. Learning how to do things with your remaining vision is okay. However, if you are currently vision impaired, you are going to lose even more vision over time and those sight-dependent techniques you developed in the past, won’t be of any value any more. To avoid the situation that students will return to their school over—and-over again each time their vision changes in order to learn more sight-dependent skills, the teachers prefer to teach you once. They do this by forcing the students to develop skills that don’t depend on any remaining vision. They do this by having each student attend all their classes blindfolded. That way, there is no cheating by using remaining vision.

To many instructors of the vision impaired, this is really hard-core. Many schools are more than happy to have students come-and-go through their doors—as many as six times in the case of one student I spoke to. This is inefficient and expensive.

The best solution is to teach once for a lifetime utilizing techniques that don’t depend on vision and that will last a lifetime. Those were the skills I wanted.

I could talk for pages on what I learned during my short time there. Don’t worry, I won’t. The short version so far is that I was taught how to cross busy streets wearing a blindfold and carrying a cane.

Steps for crossing a busy street while totally blind

Listen: the most effective tool for crossing a busy street is your ears. When you listen, you can gather information like where the traffic is going, which direction it is going, and therefore, when it is yourturn to cross.

Wait: Rushing is for road-kill. Even if you have to listen through several traffic cycles, it is better to be safe.

Be confident: When it is time to cross, being tentative while crossing a street confuses drivers. When you cross assertively, traffic will make way for you and you will be able to get out of traffic much more quickly.

I would love to say that the first time I was instructed on how to cross a road blindfolded, I was able to do it the first time with complete confidence. I would be untruthful if I did. It was not like that at all. I had to walk up to that street several times before I would even step off a curb. That took about a week. However, with facing my fear and putting myself in to a situation I would have avoided otherwise, I was able to cross the street with confidence and safety. In fact, after two weeks, the instructors had me teaching the new student arrivals.

Lots of lessons from this experience

Learning how to cross a street involved a lot more than just following a few3 rules. It involved putting myself into a situation I would have unconsciously avoided in the past. It involved learning how to tackle my problem in steps building confidence and skill as I progressed. And finally, it involved sharing my knowledge with others so that they can go beyond their own barrios like I did.

Did you find this post interesting? Got some ideas on how I can improve it? Got some questions of your own? I am here fo4r you. Please leave a comment and I promise to respond as soon as I can.