Not seeing is believing one man can make a difference
Thomas Kozak doesn’t know exactly what a Tim Hortons cup looks like, though he has picked up and thrown out hundreds of them.
With a walking stick, rubber gloves and two grocery bags in hand, his trusty dog along for the exercise, Kozak picks up litter in the Glengarry area three times a day.
He looks like a surfer with his tousled sandy brown hair, cut-off jean shorts, sandals and Angry Bird T-shirt.
He is legally blind, with minimal vision in his left eye, enough that he can see shapes and colours, but no details. Garbage stands out on green grass, especially if it’s white, he says.
His route often takes him along 137th Avenue and 82nd Street, down to Yellowhead Trail and up 97th Street, emptying the garbage into nearby bins so he can refill the bags.
He works for half an hour to three hours a day, and sometimes in the evenings collects trash at one of the schools in the Glengarry area, where he lives in a home his parents own.
“Since I’m on AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped) and I’m not able to find employment for myself, and I take from taxpayer dollars to fund my living, I feel like I should give back a little bit, and this is what I do for them,” says Kozak, 35.
He was seven when his eyesight started going on and off like a light switch. One day he was playing hockey and his legs collapsed under him and everything went black. He remembers coming to in the dressing room, his dad asking him what happened.
There were more odd symptoms: a fever of 104 degrees, stumbling and falling in gymnastics class, difficulty seeing the blackboard.
In 1985, doctors found a tumour in the Grade 1 student’s brain.
While it was non-cancerous, the tumour damaged his optical nerve, leaving him without vision in his right eye and four per cent tunnel vision in the left.
While he did not return to playing hockey, he has done his best to live a normal life. He has taught windsurfing, trained in taekwondo, takes salsa lessons and is restoring an 1987 Mustang.
“(My parents) just treated me like a normal person, they didn’t really treat me like I had a disability,” he says. “It’s made me the person that I am today.”
A person who motivates his friends to go to the gym every day, as he does, helps others move, picks up litter in his neighbourhood, which he done for the past 10 years.
Kozak’s friend, Dr. Paula van Nostrand, is president of the human rights organization Project International Hope Institute.
She has dealt with many people on AISH, but said in her experience there are few who manage their money and give back to their community as well as Kozak does.
“It’s so redeeming and so motivating to see somebody go around the area where he lives and pick up the garbage, and he does it routinely, every morning, like it’s a job,” Nostrand says. “Well, it isn’t a job, he doesn’t get paid for it, he doesn’t have to do it, nobody tells him to do it.”
For Kozak, picking up trash comes with a few personal benefits. It keeps him occupied, and he thinks it may boost the value of his house.
“When I walk around, I find a bottle here and there, and I go, ‘Yeah, I found 10 cents,’ ” he says. “I guess it sounds kind of homeless, but it kind of helps out with finances.”
But not having a job does take its toll.
The last permanent position he held was 15 years ago, when he did maintenance work in a machine shop for a year and a half.
Since then, he has turned to employment and temp agencies for help. He worked for a month as a groundskeeper at the legislature and in former NDP MLA Raj Pannu’s office for two weeks.
According to the CNIB, 65 per cent of adults who are blind or partially sighted are unemployed, while half live on incomes of $20,000 a year or less.
Many are highly educated, but don’t have the work experience to help them get jobs, says Diane Bergeron, CNIB’s national director of government relations and advocacy.
“People with vision loss are very capable and very skilled and talented, just like any other person they may want to hire,” Bergeron says. “There just needs to be a bit of accommodation made in order to make that happen.
“You can only pound the pavement for so long and have people tell you that you’re not capable for so long before you start believing it, and before you just give up.”
Kozak has completed the majority of a diploma from MacEwan University to become a registered massage therapist, but was forced to drop out two years ago because his grade point average was too low. He tried to reapply but wasn’t accepted.
He receives $1,588 through AISH every month. While his three children do not live with him, out of that income he pays some child support and travels every month to Fort McMurray, where his 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter live with his former wife. Twice a week he goes to Fort Saskatchewan to visit his five-year-old son, who lives with his former girlfriend.
“It’s discouraging,” he says of his unemployment. “I want to not just prove to myself that I can be an asset to society, but also I want to prove to my children that their father is able to get out there and work in the field, even though I have a disability.”
If he does get a job, he says he would still work at making his community a better place, one piece of garbage at a time.