Helping others see the way

Waxhaw—Richard Steele can’t see the large color photograph that hangs lopsided in his tiny office, the only decoration on the plain white walls.

But he knows the 8-by-10 depicts a slender African man hunched over a table, his hand skimming a thick white manuscript. The man, Abu, lost his eyesight before he could walk.

At 25 years old, he was reading for the first time.

“It was an incredible moment,” Steele recalls. “All he wanted to do was learn to read, and it was such a struggle. The hardest thing is to teach them how to translate dot patterns into a word into an idea.”

Steele is blind, but he has devoted his life to helping others see.

Abu was the first of hundreds of blind West Africans in the tiny country of Togo who learned to read Braille through a program Steele spent six years developing as a missionary. As they learned to read, Abu and many of his kinsmen opened their hearts to Christianity.

“We’ve got to go a step further to get God’s Word to people who cannot see or who cannot read,” says Steele, who helped translate the New Testament from Abu’s language into Braille.

Steele, a country boy from Lancaster, S.C., now works for JAARS, a Waxhaw-based missionary-support organization. Though he no longer works directly with native people, Steele is opening eyes in a different way.

Capitalizing on the idea that not everyone can learn to read, his department trains missionaries to design and produce audiocassettes, videotapes and music in native languages as alternative ways to share Christianity.

“Like me, not everyone is going to be able to read and write,” Steele says. “Yet they need God’s word as desperately as everyone else. We’re getting it to them in forms they can understand, in their own language.”

He was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disease that kills the cells of the retina and ultimately leads to blindness. Some 100,000 Americans suffer from the condition, which has no cure and very little in the way of treatment.

The news that he would lose his eyesight devastated Steele, who had to abandon his dream of becoming a scientist and researching cures for disease.

“My doctor knew I had this since I was a teen-ager, but he didn’t tell me until I was 22,”" Steele recalls. “When I asked him why he didn’t tell me earlier, he said he didn’t think I could handle it. If I had known, at least I could have prepared for it.”

Today, Steele can barely distinguish between light and darkness and cannot see shapes. He relies on a cane and listens to the Bible on cassettes. He gave up driving long ago

For many of his daily tasks, he depends on Carolyn, his wife of 37 years.

“There are some things you always miss,” Steele says. “My wife has to take on a tremendous amount of responsibility because she has a blind husband. I miss that responsibility. I miss being able to read the newspaper and measure things in my (wood-working) workshop.”

But he’s not bitter.

“God doesn’t make mistakes,” he says. “This happened for a reason.”

“Ever since I was 19, I’ve had this feeling in my mind and heart that God sent me for something special,” Steele says now. "“When I began teaching children whose parents worked for JAARS and I learned what JAARS was, I knew that’s what God wanted me to do.”

JAARS, formerly known as Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, provides transportation, communications, computer and other logistical support for missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators and Summer Institute of Linguistics. The missionaries travel to the farthest corners of the world to translate the Bible into obscure and unwritten languages.

After various assignments for JAARS, Steele felt he was being called by God to Togo, West Africa, where one in 100 people is blind from onchocerciasis, a disease caused by microscopic parasites carried by black flies.

“God sent me to these people because I was blind,” Steele says, “because I had rapport and credibility with them.”

When Steele arrived in 1984, he began creating a Braille alphabet from Bassar, the language of much of Togo. It eventually took him five weeks, working 15 hours a day, to print 10 copies of the Bassar New Testament in Braille. The 1,826-page, 35-volume Braille New Testament weighs 35 to 40 pounds and fills a shelf 6 feet long.

Steele also began developing a school where sighted Africans could teach Braille to those who couldn’t see. His goal was to establish a program that would continue even after he left.

“Africans believe that blindness is a punishment from God, so the blind are ostracized in their communities,” Steele says. “We wanted to help blind people not only to read, but also to give them skills like animal husbandry and farm work so they could help themselves.”

At the school, which has continued to flourish, blind students start each day with a two-hour Bible study and prayer meeting, study Braille for two or three hours, work on their mobility for an hour and take care of livestock for two hours. Most stay at the school for 18 months.

“How can I be bitter about my blindness when there are close to 2,000 Christians in Africa who weren't there before this program started?” Steele asks. “The blind people who became Christians not only witnessed to other blind people, but to their kinsfolk and their neighbors.”

“I think Richard’s motto is the same as the Nike one, ‘Just do it,’” says Mike Reese, who worked with Steele in Togo and is now a colleague at the JAARS center. “He sees the glass as half-full. He’s always looking for opportunities to serve and make a difference.”

Steele says he believes what he’s doing now—providing support for overseas missionaries—is just as important as his work in Africa. He recalls Samuel 30:24, in which David tells his followers that “whoever stays behind with the supplies get the same share as the one who goes to battle.”

“There are some of us who—in order to help that missionary in South Korea or Africa be successful—we need to be back here watching the baggage,” Steele says.

Steele says he’s finally found his niche in the center’s Vernacular Media Services department.

The department trains missionaries to design and produce non-print media such as audiocassettes, filmstrips and music in native languages to spread the Christian message.

“I believe in all my heart that this department is changing people’s lives by getting God’s word to people in all forms,” Steel says.

Even Abu, his first reader, understands that philosophy. A natural musician, Abu has composed hundreds of songs in his native language that spread the Christian message.

“Abu has changed the whole area because of his music,” Steele says. “Africans all over are singing about God’s love in Abu’s songs. All I did was give him a way to write them down.”