Known by her family and friends as Julie Woods, one day Julie realised that to others she came in contact with she was remembered as something different. “Returning to a shop one week later” told Julie, “the man behind the counter turned to his wife and said ‘this is that blind girl’ I was telling you about!”  

At first, Julie was frustrated by this description of herself but “it happened again when I went into another shop” says Julie “but this time the guy said ‘hey you are that blind chick who was on the TV news last night’.” Eventually, she found she was describing herself in the same way.  “If I phoned back anywhere ” explained Julie, “I found I would be describing myself as ‘that blind woman’ who came into your store yesterday” or “that blind woman who spoke at your dinner last week”

“I had to accept that my most distinguishing feature was that I am now a blind person” says Julie “with my second most distinguishing feature being that I am a woman”.

On March 27, 2007, Julie put an advertisement in the local paper and threw a party to say thank you to all those people who had helped her in her first 10 years as a blind person.

She also took this opportunity to reflect on the things she had learned in the first 10 years of being blind, and wrote them down in her book “How to Make a Silver Lining – 8 Keys for Adapting to Extraordinary Change” which she self-published in July 2009.

For those of you out there who don’t know, Julie’s famous for her chocolate licorice truffles.She’s also famous for speaking to schoolkids. She’s combined her two loves and rolled them into a unique project to visit every intermediate school in New Zealand (all 119 of them!), which is what this blog is about.