A vision to succeed for shopkeepers

Program to aid blind expands opportunity throughout Georgia.

Edward “Eddie” Mial Jr. grew up with zero confusion about how to live an appreciative life. His father, a 20-year police patrol officer in Philadelphia, taught him to stand up to his problems and blame no one but himself if things went south.

“I can still hear what he said about 30, 40 years, ago,” said Mial of his father, who passed away in 2015. “It’s on you, nothing else. You don’t have no fingers to point to but yourself.”

The unshakable lessons of the father are what have pulled the son out of some of the most difficult times of his life. A juvenile diabetic at age 3, Mial lost his sight from complications of the disease about 15 years ago.

But you would never know it. The 53-year-old Mial runs a well-stocked snack shop in the basement of the DeKalb County Courthouse on North McDonough Street in Decatur. He is among more than 75 small-business operators who are part of Georgia’s Business Enterprise Program, an offspring of a federal program established in the 1930s to tap the entrepreneurial skills of the visually impaired.

The program’s participants, like Mial, run snack bars, dining halls, vending machines and other businesses across the state. Most of the businesses are housed in state and federal courthouses, military bases and other government facilities. One operator manages a cafeteria at Fort Benning, near the Georgia-Alabama border, that feeds more than 13,000 Army soldiers a day.

CONTRIBUTED BY PHIL SKINNER Anthony Brewer (left) fist-bumps Eddie Mial, the blind shopkeeper who runs the snack shop in the basement of the DeKalb County Superior Court in Decatur. Federal law gives the blind preferences in operating some businesses in federal government buildings.