Blind With Ambitions : Handicap: Sightless couple struggle to make their family self-reliant by overcoming obstacles to better jobs.

His hands dripping with gasoline, fingernails caked with grease and overalls stained with oil, Juan Flores looks like a typical auto mechanic.

But, as he patiently works his way through the engine parts of assorted cars and motorcycles cluttering the side and front yards of his modest San Diego mobile home, one difference is instantly clear: Flores is blind.

That fact may effect the way he does the job, said Flores, 43, but it hardly stops him from the work he was trained for.

Along with his wife, Linda, who is also blind and a trained instructor of blind adults, Flores struggles to overcome the bias of many employers who believe sightless workers can’t do the job.

With his head pressed firmly against the handlebars of a Yamaha motorcycle, Flores strained to reach the piece holding the carburetor and, by touch, identify the type of screwdriver he needed to remove it.

“OK,” he said with mock surprise. “This takes a No. 10 socket wrench.”

Using his hand to guide himself along the side of the mobile home, in the Palm City neighborhood of South San Diego, he climbed a small flight of stairs, went inside and quickly returned with the tool. Five minutes later, he held the carburetor in his hand and shook it, listening for any peculiar sounds.

Then he adeptly checked the idle, the air intake valve and explained why the choke valve didn’t work. He removed the carburetor cover, drained the remaining gasoline from inside and prepared to remove the gaskets and soak the pieces in solvent before blowing away any remaining dirt with an air compressor.

Flores was losing his sight when he came to the United States 17 years ago from Mexico City, where he worked in an insecticide plant. The blindness resulted from exposure to chemicals in the plant, he said.

Admittedly, he can’t do everything a seeing mechanic can.

He needs someone to read an engine’s specifications before he can tune it up and, because of the complexity, has trouble repairing the four-barrel carburetors on larger and older cars and trucks.

“If I cannot do it, I say so,” said Flores. “To be honest is better.”

Still, employers make too much of his handicap, he said.

“I’ve applied for jobs but can’t get one because garage owners say, ‘I don’t think our insurance will cover you because you’re blind,’ ” he said. “So they won’t hire me.”

Pamela Skawin, a job placement coordinator at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles, said many employers have unfounded beliefs about insurance coverage for blind workers.

“A lot of employers think their insurance rates will go up if they hire the disabled,” she said. “Insurance rates are based on the actuarial history of the employer, not an individual. It has nothing to do with the individual they’re going to hire.”

This sort of blanket discrimination against blind workers is common and helps account for the 70% unemployment rate among blind Americans, said Sharon Gold, president of the National Federation of the Blind of California Inc.

Employers often perceive blind workers as unqualified, even though many are equipped with years of work experience or vocational training, she said.

Flores, for instance, has worked on motor vehicles for years, holds a certificate in brakes and tune-ups from San Diego City College, and is one course shy of earning a certificate from Southwestern Community College in small engine repairs.

“I was impressed by the work that he could do,” said Joe Perretta, one of Flores’ former instructors at Southwestern. “He could find parts faster than I could. He practically assembled the whole engine of a motorcycle by himself.”

Employers, Gold said, incorrectly decide that blind workers cannot perform a given task after employers themselves attempt the same task with their eyes closed.

“The truth is most employers aren’t trained to be blind,” Gold said. “They think, by association, that closing your eyes and doing a job is what it means to be blind when, of course, it isn’t.”

Many blind workers use various forms of government and private aid as well as their own money to acquire special training or equipment to allow them to better compete in the workplace. Some hire professional readers who read background documents to them or purchase computer hardware capable of doing the same.

Many are trained to use the equipment and to update their job and living skills in special schools and organizations like the Braille Institute or the Service Center for the Blind in San Diego.

Linda Flores, 40, teaches English as a Second Language part-time at the Service Center’s recently renovated building at 59th Street and El Cajon Boulevard. Many of her students are refugees from wars who came to the U.S. to live with relatives, she said. Some have had no formal education.

Much of Linda’s job is teaching blind adults how to conceptualize things they’ve never done before, like counting money, making telephone calls, or plotting their locations while trying to get around the city--tasks that sighted people take for granted.

In class, Linda asked Laotian-American student Kham Loukprasong, 20, to pick out a small wooden square from a box of assorted shapes. Then, holding Loukprasong’s hand in her own, Linda told the young woman that the square was shaped like a city block like the one where the school is located, then walked the woman’s index and middle fingers from one edge of the square to the next.

Linda asked her what the second edge is called.

“The corner,” Loukprasong answered proudly.

Then Linda walked the woman’s fingers around the rest of the square until they landed at their starting point.

“Where are you now?” Linda asks. When the woman seems puzzled, Linda tells her she has walked around the block until she is at the corner where she started.

Loukprasong is silent. Linda repeats the exercise, but the woman still does not reply.

Outside the class, Linda explained that the student had never walked around the block by herself so she could not understand the concept.

Later, Linda and sighted co-teacher Rolly Abernathy lead the class in an exercise meant to practice movements.

As students stand and move their hands wherever Abernathy instructs them to, Linda uses her hands in place of her eyes and feels the positions of their arms and hands to make sure the students understood the command in English. At times, she speaks in Spanish to Latino students who didn’t understand the English command.

In another movement exercise, student Carmen Castillo rests her arm on Linda’s shoulder and moves with Linda as she steps back and forth, left and right, again to Abernathy’s command.

“OK, relax,” Abernathy says.

“What is relax?” Loukprasong asks.

“Relaaaaxxxxxxxxx,” both teachers sighed.

“Oh, relaaaaaxxxxxx,” she imitated.

Linda, who was born blind and came to San Diego when she was 6, has taught at the school seven years and said she would like to increase her hours but, for one, the limited state funds and private donations the school relies on make such an increase difficult.

Another consideration for any blind worker seeking employment or trying to increase working hours, she said, is the possible loss of Social Security income, medical and insurance benefits should her pay exceed the maximum allowed by the government.

Linda blames the necessity of Social Security on employer discrimination and a double-standard pay scale for blind workers and their sighted colleagues.

Nevertheless, she acknowledges the difficulty her own family has had shedding their dependence on Social Security disability income and the county’s aid to dependent children. Together, the Floreses would have to earn nearly $24,000 a year plus medical benefits in order to get their family of four completely off that aid, Linda said. And that, along with finding automotive employment for Juan, is her eventual goal, she said.

“I tell my son you have to work and be able to support yourself without anyone supporting you,” Juan said, referring to his own frustration with government aid.

From all appearances, the couple’s relationship with their children, John Paul, 14, and Sherrene, 10, neither of whom is blind, is much like that of any other family.

While Juan prepared to work on a motorcycle on a recent Tuesday just before his son’s birthday, John Paul needled his mother to hurry with a shirt he wanted to wear that morning, which was still in the family’s washer.

“You do have other shirts, you know,” countered Linda.

Minutes later she quickly joined Juan outside in his work area to escape the blaring sounds of “Mama Said Knock U Out,” an L.L. Cool J rap record John Paul had put on the stereo.

“Teen-agers,” Linda sighed, holding her forehead. “He’ll be 14 soon,” she said, in an attempt to explain the loud music. “If he makes it.”