From: Nathan Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 Subject: Thank You for the Grant!! To The Change A Life Foundation … Best regards. I would like to introduce myself. My Name is Nathan and I am totally blind. My blindness is due to diabetes. I am 43 years young and I have been blind for approximately 10 years. When I first went blind in 2002, I figured it was time to give up on life and just throw in the towel. As someone who was newly blind, I didn't know wear to turn or where to go. I was confused and literally in a world of darkness. Up until I went blind, I had always worked hard and believed that I would eventually reach my goals if I worked hard enough. I formerly worked in route sales and drove a commercial truck for a living. This was over a fairly large territory. I also had a spacious three-bedroom home on two acres of lan. A wife, two cars, two dogs, and a BMW Motorcycle to round it off. Then I began to lose my sight and eventually I lost everything I had worked so long and hard to accomplish. Yes. The wife was the first to go. As a result of blindness, I was forced to move back home to live with my mother in a tiny one-bedroom house. I was pretty depressed at the time and often wished for death. But I didn't give up. Eventually, I discovered Voc Rehab and they agreed to send me to blind school.(Junior Blind of America.) That was really the beginning of the turning point. I attended computer, Braille, mobility, and independent living classes at JBA, and I assimilated the new information rapidly. But there were two things missing. The first was that I did not feel comfortable with the "sighted" mobility lessons I was receiving at JBA. I refer to the mobility lessons as "sighted," because my mobility instructor could see and he gave me visual instruction that would be useful only to a blind person who had some partial vision. This "sighted" mobility was not helpful to me at all. I was also not comfortable with the fact that I could not see other people walking and moving nearby me. Not only that, but the blind school was located in a particularly bad area, so going outside the school for mobility made me extremely uncomfortable. What I really wanted to do was take some sort of self-defense classes for protection, something that would work for a blind person if the situation called for it. I had heard about a school for self-defense called the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy. Located in Torrance, the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy was only a short distance from JBA. I had heard all kinds of good things about the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy, so I made it my goal to train there. I also announced my intentions to the staff at JBA. Surprisingly, I faced huge opposition from my "sighted" mobility instructor and the staff at JBA. Apparently, they were under the impression that my studies at JBA would somehow be lacking if I attended self-defense classes at the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy while attending classes at JBA. They even went as far as contacting my counselor at Voc Rehab to try and prevent me from taking the self-defense lessons. My argument was that if I attended the self-defense classes outside of normal school hours, then it was on my own free time--and JBA had no right to tell me what I could or couldn't do on my free time. I also explained to my Voc Rehab counselor how beneficial the self-defense lessons would be, especially since I had to perform mobility in a relatively bad area. My Voc Rehab counselor agreed, and I signed up straightaway at the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy. That was back in 2003. Enter Daniel Kish. One of my blind friends at JBA first told me about Daniel Kish and some of the incredible things he was doing with Echolocation. I did some research and I couldn't believe what I was reading. It was then I came up with the concept, Why not combine Gracie Jiu-Jitsu with Daniel Kish's Echolocation? It was totally off the wall, but why not?? I mean all sorts of new ventures have been tried and they have succeeded. It was then that I obtained information on Daniel's website and began sending him emails. Meanwhile, I was still training in Gracie Jiu-Jitsu as well as keeping up with my studies at JBA. Fast forward to now, and I have a small Gracie Garage training studio in my home where I now train students for free. A Gracie Garage is an informal training area where Gracie students can get together to study and practice martial arts. The training is free, and anyone who runs a Gracie garage is not allowed to charge a fee of any kind. I opened my Gracie garage 1 year ago (the first for a blind person) and year-to-date I now have 5 students. I have also recently obtained my level 1, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Instructor Certification--the first blind person in history to achieve that status. And here is where the grant comes in. Thanks to the generous grant from the Change A Life Foundation, I will now be able to open up a professional Gracie Jiu-Jitsu training studio, where I will be able to make a living and charge students for my services. I will now be able to incorporate Gracie Jiu-Jitsu with Daniel Kish's Echolocation to form a one-of-a-kind, revolutionary training facility where sighted and blind students can train side by side!!! Think of how many people I will now be able to help with your grant!!! This is truly a dream and a major goal come true! I plan to teach blind and sighted students alike at an extremely affordable cost. Daniel Kish has been wholly responsible and extremely helpful on informing me and helping me obtain this very generous grant. He has also been working with me for sometime along with his top assistant and blind mobility instructor, Brian Bushway. I still have a ways to go with learning self-defense and mobility, but your kind and generous grant will make the next step possible!!! When I am training in my Gracie Garage studio, I use Daniel's "clicks" to determine relative body location to determine where my students are standing. This allows me to track them with relative ease and makes it possible to move around my training studio just like a sighted person!! Daniel is a true professional in every sense of the word, and Brian is a great coach and excellent mobility instructor! Again, I can't thank The Change A Life Foundation enough! {{ I am providing a short video where you can see me in action describing my Gracie Garage. http://www.viddler.com/explore/ezesmith/videos/14/ }} Nathan