(Image Credit: CFJC News)

By Sydney Chisholm

WHITE CANE WEEK

White Cane Week back to bring visual impairment awareness to Kamloops

Feb 1, 2023 | 5:33 PM

KAMLOOPS – Reading with your fingertips or using a cane to get around may seem uncommon to most people, but Linda Hall has lived her whole life visually impaired.

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, you don’t look blind,’ or, ‘You don’t look like you have sight loss,’” Hall said. “Um yeah, we don’t look different than anyone else, I hope.”

Hall says the lack of awareness around visual impairment can make life more difficult for those without sight.

In order to bring awareness to vision impairment, the local White Cane Club will be hosting community initiatives as part of National White Cane Week – including a bowling event and a jelly bean contest at Northills Centre.

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“We go out into the community and make people aware of people with vision loss and blindness and we show them the different ways we get around with,” Hall told CFJC News.

As president and longest-standing member of the Kamloops group, Hall says she fell in love with the social club the first meeting she attended.

“When [the club] phoned me, I thought, ‘Do I really want to belong to another club?’ I thought, ‘Well, it doesn’t hurt to check it out,’” she said. “I went and I joined before I left the meeting and have been there ever since.”

According to Hall, clubs like the White Cane provide a community and support members may struggle to find on their own.

“The people that you grow up with, they just don’t understand it, like the visually impaired,” Hall said. “That really, really helps because you’ve got somebody you can call on to see if there’s different ways of doing things.”

While the White Cane Club has been around locally for three decades and participated in many awareness weeks, Hall said awareness is still a significant challenge for the visually impaired.

“I think it doesn’t matter how many years we’ve done this awareness, there are still people out there who don’t know what all these apparatuses are that we use to get around,” Hall said.

However, she has seen some improvement in community awareness in the past 30 years.

“Somebody will come up to them and say, ‘Can I help you?’ where before, I don’t think there was that much of that being done,” Hall said.