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Student Finds Light in the Darkness
by Heather Tourtellotte
The lights are left off. They are not really needed until someone else comes in. The room looks like any other private room. Walls with posters on it, one bed, a dresser with the mirror covered with butterfly decorations and a desk with a computer on it. The only difference is her computer talks to her.
Twenty-year-old Kim Loftis was born in Burnsville, N.C., and has been blind since she was born three months premature. Her eyes were still fused shut when they put her on 100 percent oxygen, which caused her to go blind.
Kim Loftis
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Loftis has a very good attitude towards life despite being blind. She believes that attitude is everything, and she grew up saying, "So what? I can do just about anything that everybody else can do." She has never gone to her classes believing that something couldn't be modified to help her.
She uses the Braille format for her books sometimes, but she can get her college textbooks as well as other books on tape. She also has readers.
To take notes for her classes she uses a special type of laptop computer which has Braille keys. To take tests she either takes them orally with the teacher or has someone read the test to her and she or the reader writes the answers down.
Loftis's computer has a voice card, and it reads the webpages and e-mails for her when she surfs the Internet. She can scan her class's syllabus on her scanner, and it reads the syllabus to her as well.
This is Loftis's third year as a student of Mars Hill. She is going for a BA in voice, which works toward the equivalent of Music Therapy when she goes to graduate school at Appalachian State University. A music therapy person is a psychologist who uses music to get through to people.
Loftis explained that music therapy works as an aid in the healing process for people with various illnesses and problems, from terminal to autistic. It can help calm kids down, draws out autistics, helps abused people cope, and it gives families of memory loss patients a way to connect to them by songs.
Loftis graduated from Mt. Heritage High School in Burnsville where she acted in many plays and played trombone in the band. While she was in the theater her group went to regional competitions all three years. She also took private lessons in piano.
She visited Mars Hill College during her junior year of high school, and she liked the homey atmosphere and the Liberal Arts program. She was trying to decide whether to go for theatre or music. She chose music, which was one of the factors in her decision to go here; another factor was that it's close to home.
The only thing Loftis struggles with about being blind is that she can't be one hundred percent independent. She is a very independent person as it is, and she could walk more by herself around campus if it weren't for crossing the roads. "I don't want to cross the street with the crazy drivers," she says. Loftis knows the layout of the college, and she uses a cane. She can tell where she's at by the change in acoustics. For example, when she walks past the library, it sounds different from when she walks out in the open.
Loftis writes songs, poems, and creative stories as well as reading and listening to music. She listens to a variety of music, from classical to Nirvana. She has some favorite authors like Nora Roberts, Poe, and Yates.
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