Blindness is a challenge, not a handicap
By Chris Mac Kenzie
For The Alpine Sun
ALPINE — “It’s exhilarating! It’s invigorating! It was my leap of faith!”
That’s the way Steffani Kreger describes the day when she went sky diving over Otay Lakes last Sept. 8 with Elite Adventures. Her only regret is that she couldn’t see the beautiful world below because she has been completely blind for the past 18 years. “I want to do it again, every year on the anniversary of my first jump,” she adds.
Sky diving is not the only daringly courageous act she has tried. She’s gone rock climbing. She hiked 11 miles of the railroad and trestle in Jacumba and didn’t discover that this was illegal until afterward. She broke and trained a wild Appaloosa horse for trail riding despite being bucked off the first few times.
Kreger is determined to prove that a disability is only a challenge, not a handicap.
Even her daily life seems like an act of sheer courage to most people. This young woman lives alone, taking care of two horses, two dogs, a cat and a five foot pet albino garden snake, by herself. She manages her home in Harbison Canyon which was spared the worst of the Cedar Fire although the flames burned right up the windows and melted the blinds. A good neighbor with a garden hose doused the smoldering eaves, but her entire yard burned to a crisp.
“But I can’t just sit around,” she says.
She goes to Grossmont College and City College, taking all kinds of classes, especially in advanced computer techniques. On Sundays she attends Emanuel Christian Church and during the week she is involved in Bible classes, studies alternative and homeopathic medicine and is writing a book to be called
Living, Loving and Laughing with the subtitle Not a How to Book But a Why Don’t You
Book?
She also likes to cook and maintains that “I don’t need to read labels and packages, I just taste a lot as I go along.” Maybe that’s why she works out three times a week at the Wild West Athletic Club.
Kreger grew up in Imperial Beach and Ocean Beach, an outdoor, active type as a young girl.
“I used to call myself the cowboy in the sand,” remembers Kreger. The family moved to Crest when she was 16, so she went to high school in East County. She became a free lance artist and photographer and recalls that she did the decorating for a restaurant on Alpine Boulevard and a shop that did silk screening on t-shirts.
She maintains that she was still quite shy when she lost her sight.
“I had to learn a lot,” she says. “And I couldn’t have made it without Elizabeth Solarno from the California Department of Rehabilitation. She has been by my side for years.”
She quickly learned to use the electronic gadgets that are available for those with limited sight like a talking watch, a talking clock and a cell phone into which she can speak a phone number. Her computer has a program called Open Book that reads aloud anything she has typed into it. College classes provide most of her lessons on disks to use at home, but she still needs a real person to read some of the class work aloud.
Transportation which could have been a real problem, is solved by the county bus system for the handicapped, which picks her up at home and delivers her to her destination.
In addition to losing her sight, Kreger has had a number of very serious illnesses, including a double transplant of kidney and pancreas and several other operations, but she has never lost her zest for living.
“I found Christ and became a Christian about six months before my sight was gone completely,” she says. “And I do believe that my faith has gotten me through the hard times. I pray. I talk to God. He answers me and has helped me learn what love really is. He send visions to show me what to do next.”
Kreger visits the Healing Room maintained by the County Church Ministries in El Cajon where the Rev. George Runyan has helped her to believe in the power of prayer and the God based miracles that have saved her life.
This active vital woman is looking ahead to what else she can do with her life. Her studies with Rosemarie Michelson of Crest in homeopathic medicine and muscle reflexology have inspired her to plan for the future. She hopes to move to Flagstaff, Ariz., then commute to nearby Sedona to work in the field of sports medicine.
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