Sightless, She Sees the Hope in Others

For most of the past three decades, 57-year-old Rose Wright of Pacoima has tended to the needs of the homeless and heartbroken of her community.

She spends hours in Hansen Dam Park every week, talking to the disenfranchised. She takes them to hospitals or brings them food, blankets, good cheer or cajoling. She carts them to rehabilitation centers, the welfare office, Christ Memorial Church of Pacoima, sometimes to her own home. She telephones councilmen, county supervisors, welfare workers, directors of homeless shelters, doctors and lawyers on their behalf. She gets them involved in alcohol- and drug-rehabilitation support groups at the church. She has done everything from helping to raise cocaine-addicted babies to spearheading a recent drive to raise money for the burial of “Papa John,” a homeless man who was a fixture at Hansen Dam Park.

And she has done it all while operating in a sightless world. Rose Wright has been blind since the age of 13.

“I can say that she has eyes that are built within,” said Bishop Benjamin J. Crouch of Christ Memorial Church. “These eyes she has are divine. She can feel the need of others without actually looking at them from a physical standpoint. God has given her this knowledge.”

Added Christ Memorial parishioner Norma Jean Basley:

“What Rose does, being sightless, is short of a miracle. First, consider that she has to pre-plan whatever her strategy is for a given day, get all the people into play who will pick her up, carry her around, bring her back, etc. People who have been helped by Rose often don’t know that she is blind.”

But they may very well know they have been touched by someone special. Said Wright, a treasured member of Christ Memorial’s parish, “If you meet a person, and they’re down, you talk ‘em up!”

And so she does. With help from her secretary, Deborah Shockley, daughter-in-law Theodora Jones and a host of relatives, Wright seeks out strangers and addresses them as though they were, well, her own children.

“I think, being sightless, God has given her a special gift of fearlessness about approaching people,” said Basley. “It doesn’t matter who it is. If they brought George Bush to her and she had something to tell him, she’d tell him! She’s not concerned about what color you are, what your background is. It’s, ‘Do you have a problem and if so, what can we do about it?’ ”

Said Capt. Valentino Paniccia of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division: “I’ve seen her at community meetings. I’ve seen her at rallies against drugs. And I’ve also seen her at the Pacoima Chamber of Commerce meetings. I saw her offer testimony on behalf of the Northeast Valley Human Relations Council a year ago at a county fact-finding meeting on the homeless in San Fernando. Everything I’ve seen her involved in has been a positive thing to improve the community and the life style of the people who live in it. Being blind certainly makes it much more difficult to do what she is doing. Good lady.”

Added Marie Harris, honorary mayor of Pacoima who has known and worked with Wright for the past five years, “I wish more people would do half the job she does.”

Although she is flattered by such praise, Wright does not tout her achievements; rather, she speaks excitedly, and with pride, of the achievements of those she’s helped. Seated in a meeting room of her second home, Christ Memorial Church, she told of one case after another--after another:

* “Oh, I have many kids.” (For Wright, who has six children, anyone who comes into her life is “hers.”) “I have one young man I’m so proud of now. He’s Hispanic. I met him about a year ago, and he was really down and out. He wasn’t doing anything, just sleeping in his car. My nephew found him. He told me, ‘My mother got married again, and they don’t want me. I had to leave home.’ We talked and talked, and he stayed with me for a while, and we got him reunited with his family. He got a job at a department store in shipping and receiving, and yesterday was his first day at Valley College.

“He stops in to see me sometimes, and last night he brought tears to my eyes. He said, ‘You know, I’m taking child development. I want to help these kids up here on the streets. I want to be a teacher.’ That’s my baby!”

* “I met this guy recently and he was a joy to my heart,” she said brightly. “He’s from Afghanistan, and he calls me ‘Momma.’ And he was having problems adjusting, you know, coming from an oppressed country. He said he was disgusted with his job. I said, ‘You can make it. This is a miracle. You really got it good now. You don’t have to worry anymore--you can walk down the street and do anything you want to. You can tell your boss anything, and all he can do is fire you.’ I saw him again recently, and he said, ‘I told ‘em, Momma, and they didn’t fire me.’ ”

* “I was in a shopping center one day, and this security guard said to my brother, who was driving, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t park here.’ Then he said to me, ‘Are you from Hansen Dam? Hey, I want to talk to you. Do you remember me?’ That made me very proud that I’d been able to encourage him to come out of the park. I told him, ‘You can do better--you’re young.’ He had been just laying in the park, drinking.”

How does Wright do it? About the last thing most homeless people probably want is a lecture. Indeed, down-and-outers often turn their backs on her, and sometimes they stay turned. But, more often, “when they realize she is blind, it changes their minds,” Basley said. “They start thinking, ‘If a blind woman can be out doing something with her life. . . ‘ “

“Sometimes they do just get up and walk away,” Wright said. “And I deal with it in lots of ways. Sometimes I say, ‘Well, you’re a man. You’re supposed to be gettin’ up, doin’ something.’ That’s what I tell ‘em. And you have to try to understand, of course. I ask ‘em, ‘What happened to you that was so bad that you would want to do this to yourself? Have you always been a bum?’ And they get insulted. They say, ‘I ain’t no bum.’ ”

She has a different talk, seemingly, for each person she meets.

“You try to talk to them and see the good points,” she said. “You know, like, ‘If you was out there in the snow, freezin’ to death, you got a right to give up. But this is the greatest place in the world to be down and out. You can get a blanket and roll up under a tree in Southern California. You can walk down the street and see a free orange.’ You get ‘em thinking, and they’ll begin to laugh. Then you say, ‘Well, I got better things to do, but if you’re willing to go to the welfare office, I’ll sit there with you.”

Wright sees her work as a way of giving--in return for the giving done by the people who “sat there” with her so long ago in her home town of Crassett, Ark., after her world turned to darkness. Her blindness is the result of meningitis at 13.

“After losing my sight, I didn’t want to do anything. It was a disaster,” she recalled. “I got rebellious. So my family got me a cot, and I just lay there and moped for the longest time. And that’s when God really dealt with my life. My mother was a maid for some white people, and they took an interest and saw to it that I went to school.”

Wright sighed, and smiled a broad, sweet smile.

“If people help you,” she said, “then you have to help other people.”