Crystal is one of the volunteers that I met at Bethel. She was here for six months as a consultant for Bethel because she is blind herself and has accomplished so many amazing things as a blind person.
In China in a fairly rural area where she would’ve been barred from doing a lot of things, her parents were really adamant about her learning how to read and get an education. When the local school refused to accept her because she was blind, she tested into an even better high school and she moved to Beijing with her mom.
She then went on to be a gold medalist runner in the Paralympics and became a really great flute player. She was eventually able to go to Sweden to study music at a conservatory and go to college.
Now she works for a PR firm in Sweden and is pretty much self-sufficient as a blind person. Crystal was really a really inspiring person and taught me so much about the difficulties of being a blind person – things I hadn’t really thought about before.
She said that her company would send her to business meetings because as a blind person, she couldn’t judge someone based on their appearance. Therefore, she was especially attuned to the things a person said and the way they spoke. As a result she was pretty good and accurate at judging people and a company.
She said that because she was a blind person, she could also go speak to the janitor of a company (something that normal “businesspeople” wouldn’t do on a business trip). She said that the attitudes of the lowest level employees of a company are a great reflector of how a company is and how it functions.
I learned so much from Crystal during the short time I spent with her at Bethel. She was such a happy person with such a positive outlook on life, in spite of her disabilities. Crystal gave me a lot of hope in people, just like she gave a lot of hope to all the children at Bethel who were blind and hoped for a better life.