In January of 1997, Chad Morey was 28 and working in Spokane, Washington rolling sheet metal. He had previously worked as a cook at the Seattle Sheraton, and had moved to Spokane to earn a better living. On New Year’s Eve Day, Chad and a friend went out snowmobiling. They were doing 65 on a trail along a railroad track when they hit a cable gate—a chain strung between two concrete posts and placed across the path without warning to discourage its use. Chad’s friend went home that night with minor injuries, but for Chad the accident was much more serious, as the chain caught him across the eyes. Eighteen hours of surgery later, Chad learned he’d permanently lost his eyesight.

After a three month convalescence, Chad moved to Seattle to enroll in a rehabilitation program offered by Washington State Services for the Blind, an agency of the State of Washington Department of Social and Health Services. The program required Chad’s attendance at twice-weekly classes in Olympia. The prospect of traveling alone to Olympia twice a week for six months scared Chad, but he learned to navigate the three bus trips each way without getting lost. Just facing the challenge of commuting to Olympia required a lot of determination. “I had a lot of busy streets to cross,” he says.

Working with Mitch Aguana, a State counselor, Chad learned again the skills we all take for granted: how to cook, how to type, how to get around. Then it was time to consider how to spend his life. At first Chad worked in a sheet metal shop for Lighthouse for the Blind, but handling industrial machinery without the benefit of sight scared him.

He looked for kitchen jobs, but with little success. The challenges in his path, it turned out, arose not out of his physical disability, but out of the perceptions others had of him. Potential employers were hesitant to give him a chance because they didn’t understand how he would manage. He had been proficient in the kitchen before his accident, but employers worried he would not be able to manage, or that he would cut himself. His biggest challenge was not learning to navigate without his sight, it was finding direction in the face of the limitations others assumed he had acquired.

Then Chad discovered the State’s Business Enterprise Program, a component of State Services for the Blind that offers training in managing food service businesses in state and federal government buildings. For Chad, it was the perfect opportunity. “I was hungry,” he says of his decision to enroll, “I wanted to achieve a higher goal.”

The Business Enterprise Program intensified Chad’s schedule at State Services for the Blind. Suddenly he was not only traveling to Olympia twice a week, but working twice weekly at the cafeteria at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration complex on Sand Point Way in Seattle, plus taking evening computer classes. Chad, though, gratefully accepted his new challenges. “It just clicked,” he says, “it felt like home.”

For six months Chad learned the ins and outs of running a cafeteria, everything from food service preparation to figuring taxes, from dealing with food distributors to planning a menu. Now, as he prepares to graduate from the State’s Business Enterprise Program, he is poised to seize an opportunity that as a sighted person he never thought he would have: the chance to run his own business. “It never seemed possible, even when I was sighted, to run my own business,” he says. But by the time you read this, Chad will have received his Blind Vendor’s License. He hopes to land a job managing a cafeteria at a government facility in Tacoma. He is excited to move, find a place to live, and begin his new life.