There is, Sharon Ige will tell you, a significant distinction to be made between “busy-busy” and “good-busy.”
A weekly schedule filled with family caretaking, volunteer community service, teaching opportunities, church activities and standing appointments with friends and family?
“That’s good-busy,” says the 55-year-old Pearl City resident. “How can life be bad if you have all of that?”
That Ige enjoys such a full life is testament not just to her ability to balance the things that matter to her, but also to her ability to turn adversity into an opportunity for growth.
Some 16 years ago Ige suffered arthritislike inflammation that resulted in permanent damage to her eyes. Despite 10 surgeries over a span of a year and a half, Ige was left completely blind in both eyes.
Not that she had time to despair.
“I had two kids, age 10 and 4, who still needed to eat breakfast and go to school and take a bath every day,” Ige says. “I didn’t have time to think about it. I just did what I had to do.”
Ige credits an “awesome” network of family and friends, including her then-husband Ron Ige, with helping her to adapt quickly to life without sight. She cooked, she tended to her home, she walked her son to school each weekday.
It wasn’t until her daughter graduated from high school eight years later that Ige sought out formal instruction on living with blindness from Hoopono Service for the Blind. Through the program she learned to read Braille, walk with a cane, use adaptive computer technology and efficiently perform everyday tasks.
“Hoopono gave me confidence,” she says. “They put the fire in me that there was still so much I could do and so much I still had to give.”
In short order Ige joined the Pearl City Lions Club, drawn by the Lions’ long-standing commitment to supporting vision-related causes and the chapter’s own high level of activity and community engagement.
As a member, Ige has participated in everything from handing out stickers at the club’s periodic vision screenings to painting walls at the Aiea Library. Most recently she’s served as co-chairwoman of the Knights of the Blind Lions Committee and has played an important role in expanding programs for the blind and promoting community education of blindness-related issues.
Outside of the club, Ige has found ways to draw on her experience as a teacher — she holds a degree in education from the University of Hawaii — to help others who are blind. She has taught Braille in the public schools and continues to offer free weekly instruction in Braille to a 13-year-old girl and computer skills to older adults who are blind, all out of her home.
Ige also volunteers with the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, serving as a “telephone buddy” to a senior who has limited social contacts. Ige and her boyfriend, James Gonsalves, also visit the woman at her home once a month.
Ige rounds her good-busy schedule by helping to care for her 89-year-old father, hosting Bible study sessions for fellow members of Sanctuary Christian Fellowship in Pearl City, and participating with the American Council of the Blind, whose rotating annual conference feeds her love of traveling.
“Maybe my blindness gave me more perspective on life,” Ige muses. “Maybe I feel more gratitude. God gives me awesome opportunities to love people, and I’m very blessed for that.”
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
