Audio-reader
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
“You have to smell the chocolate mint,” Diana Frederick urged as we walked through the Sensory Garden.
“I think it smells like those little Andes mints,” she smiled. “To experience it, you have to touch it to activate the scent.”
I rubbed a leaf between my fingers and sure enough, the chocolate fragrance cheered up my brain.
The Sensory Garden is a touchy-feely kind of place, located at the Audio-Reader building on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence.
Audio-Reader is a reading service for the blind, visually impaired and print disabled. Over closed-circuit radio, volunteers read newspapers, magazines and books.
The garden was started in 1996, the inspiration of Diana Frederick, Audio-Reader’s director of development. Many volunteers have helped her make it bloom.
What began as one tiny patch has grown into a wandering garden with a wheelchair-friendly brick path and a gazebo. Plants were selected for their tactile qualities or their fragrance.
Unusual shapes and textures drape over the retaining wall. There are succulents with tough skins and also lamb’s ear, covered with soft, white fuzz. You’ll also find peonies, rosemary, lavender and lemon balm.
Wind chimes catch the breeze and a raised bed makes it easy for those in wheelchairs to touch the plants, which are labeled in both English and Braille — an Eagle Scout project.
To me, this garden is just so symbolic of the caring spirit that hovers in the Audio-Reader building.
Audio-Reader employees expect a lot from themselves — and they give a lot.
The staff makes things easy for volunteers. Newspaper assignments are readied: articles are circled and pages are cut so there’s less rattling of paper over the air. Recording studios are made comfortable and user-friendly. In the winter, a fireplace adds warmth and coziness to the Audio-Reader living room.
Jennifer Nigro, volunteer coordinator, knows her charge: “My job is all about the volunteers.”
She has 350 of them to keep track of — and she loves her work.
“I keep telling people, they’ll have to haul my cold dead body out of my office because I’m going to stay until the day I die,” Nigro said, laughing.
Together, the staff and volunteers focus on serving their listeners.
Can you imagine reading a dictionary into a microphone? Me neither. But it’s been done. They’ve taken recipe cards that a woman could no longer read and made them into an audio book. A thick, diabetic cookbook has been recorded and archived.
I learned about Audio-Reader when I recorded my first commentary for Kansas Public Radio a few years ago. These two services share a building. And the generosity of the people on each side of that building fascinates me.
So I asked Janet Campbell about this. Campbell heads both services. In 1979, she started with Audio-Reader as a secretary. She’s served as director since 1990. And, if that’s not enough, she’s been general manager of KPR for 11 years.
“What makes Audio-Reader such a vortex of kindness and service?” I asked.
“The entire staff supports and promotes our mission 100 percent,” Campbell said. And that mission is “to promote independence to the blind and print-disabled by providing access to current news and information.”
The dedication to service for individual staff members often began with a personal connection.
“Everyone knows someone who can use the service,” Campbell said. “Everyone has a relative with diminished eyesight.”
Her own mother was an Audio-Reader listener.
At Audio-Reader, they read to those who cannot read for themselves. And they’ve also taken a little time to stop and plant the roses.
For information about Audio-Reader’s free services, call (800) 772-8898 or visit www.reader.ku.edu.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
F Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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