BURLINGTON, VT. –How I remember my fear as the sixth-grade softball tournament approached; how I wanted to be “a player” yet terrified that an error would underscore my disability. In confessing this to a teacher, I was appointed umpire. It made a certain amount of sense: justice is blind. So was I.

No one dared ask the obvious: how does poor eyesight qualify one for the most vision-intensive task on the field? I learned then that one aspect of being blind was this type of absurd inclusion: shielded from activity, elevated into uselessness.

I remembered that moment this past summer while listening to Joanne Wilson—whom President Bush appointed as national director of vocational rehabilitation in 2001—speak to blind teenagers at a sports and career camp I was helping facilitate at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

On the last full day, the kids made career presentations on a person they admire. Wilson visited the camp (a new joint venture of Vermont’s Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the state’s vocational rehabilitation agency and Rochester, NY-based Camp Abilities) and spoke of the value such opportunities offer. “When I was in elementary school and losing my sight,” Wilson said, “I wasn’t allowed to play any sports. But they usually made me the referee or the scorekeeper.”

Little had changed from Wilson’s childhood to mine, but I soon saw that much has changed since.

One student gave his report on NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Jr., which might have struck some counselors as a strange if not inappropriate choice of career role model. But Camp Abilities founder Lauren Lieberman immediately pointed out that in Fonda, New York, blind drivers, using special lenses called bioptics, or in some cases, sighted navigators, have been racing cars for years in their own well-established venue.

Expectations for what the blind can do have been overhauled in recent years with new technologies (especially the Internet), programs, and, perhaps most importantly, the achievements of people such as Olympic distance runner Marla Runyon and Erik Weihenmayer, who reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2001.

To guide students across this new landscape are more interactive programs like the Vermont camp, where students can surf the web with career counselors in the morning and ride behind them on a tandem bike in the afternoon.

“Camps like this are about pushing the boundaries of expectations, from inertia into action,” says Lauren Lieberman, a professor of adaptive physical education at SUNY Brockport who started Camp Abilities eight years ago. Her program motivates blind students to try activities their schools might not facilitate. “Parents, teachers, and sometimes the students themselves are all too eager to find reasons not to participate in a sport,” says Lieberman. “But with encouragement and patience, students can move towards new vistas, however small their initial steps might be.”

At the Vermont camp, a young woman who clung to her sighted guides took her first strides on rollerblades outside the dorm. A boy experienced various levels of release as he learned how to hold and heave a shot put.

While addressing her student volunteers at the Vermont camp, Lieberman recalled a conference where a speaker stressed the importance of letting blind children make choices, especially in matters that might seem strange to a fully sighted teacher, such as what color ball they want to play with. When a teacher asked why that would matter to a blind child, a woman responded, “Well, I know I’d want a red ball, rather than a blue one. Red reminds me of apples and Christmas and is happy—I want to be associated with that.”

The power to choose—a habit many blind people are slow to develop—can be a life-changing event, according to Fred Jones, director of Vermont’s Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired who headed the career portion of the camp.

Jones, who ran the career portion at the Vermont camp, spoke of his sister Dee, whose journey into esteem began with a slow walk and ended with a qualifying time to run the Boston Marathon.

Dee Jones was an overweight smoker who never thought exercise was for her, let alone running. Nevertheless, she started walking and then jogging, and then running four miles a day, amazed at how she felt. She got serious, set goals, and ran in the Green Mountain Marathon in 2001, qualifying for Boston the following year.

“Training for marathons requires a systematic approach to problem solving,” Jones says. “I learned that anything I want to do or become sparks the same sort of process: I see the goal, figure out what steps I have to take, and then begin with the first thing on the list. It’s a way of life.”

Programs such as the Vermont camp are helping the blind learn that way of life sooner

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