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Joseph Matheatau (43), a barista from Worcester in the Western Cape, makes a mean cup of coffee, despite his blindness. And he’s now educating other coffee enthusiasts.
Matheatau is engaged in accredited training courses and has just completed his international Specialty Coffee Association foundation and intermediate courses, and is working on a facilitator course.
Also, don’t think for a moment that you can take any short cuts under his guidance. He “sees” with his ears when apprentices skip a step.
“Just like my mother – she’s very specific about her tea,” he says.
For him, the biggest challenge as an educator is the ability to encourage his students because some have not yet accepted that they are blind.
Matheatau himself has had his fair share of problems since losing sight in his right eye due to glaucoma at the age of three. Years later, he also lost the use of his left eye.
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“When I was playing with my friends, there wasn’t as much of a challenge,” he says, “because I could still play and walk. But at school, the difficulties really started, because there you have to do schoolwork.”
Some of the teachers did not understand why he could not copy correctly from the blackboard, even when he was sitting at the very front of the class. They did not believe that he was blind because he was able to play normally with his friends.
As a child, Matheatau dreamed of one day driving his own big car – a 4x4, a Hummer or a BMW X5.
But, in 2010, while South Africa was in the throes of hosting the Fifa World Cup, he was forced to let go of his dream when he went completely blind.
“I could have a car, but I would never be able to drive it myself. Someone else would have to drive it for me. I had to accept that.”
However, he did not take his new lot lying down. Matheatau told his mother that he wanted to live an independent life despite his disability.
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“I remember when I went completely blind, my mother wanted to put the toothpaste on my toothbrush. I thought to myself, she raised me when I was a baby until I could run around. When I fell, she had to pick me up until I could stand up on my own. Now it’s like I’m going to be a baby again. She has to help me with the toothpaste, afraid that I might mess up my clothes. Now she wants to iron for me and cook and clean; things that she had taught me to do.
His progress did not come without challenges. Sometimes, when relearning how to cook, the pot was on the edge of the stove and his mother had to warn him about it.
Matheatau says what he needed most during that period was assistance, not for his mother to do things for him: “I had to burn my fingers so that I could learn to do things myself.”
At 38 years old, he completed matric. For a while, he was in a college in Bloemfontein, and then, in 2014, he was sent to Worcester to Innovation for the Blind, an organisation that supports visually impaired people with training. He was exposed to the art of making coffee when he started doing an entrepreneurship course.
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Whenever he felt discouraged, he would listen to Whitney Houston’s song One Moment in Time, which motivates him to this day, especially the lines: “Each day I live, I want to be a day to give the best of me.”
“This song could give a jet the fuel to fly,” Matheatau says.
His love for hot drinks comes from his grandfather, who loved tea and would make a fire to brew it. The family didn’t have electricity back then.
If you call on him at Blindiana Barista, a coffee shop and museum on Church Street in Worcester, Matheatau will quickly make you two cups of your drink of choice, perfectly filled and without spilling.
His cups and coffee beans are always in their right place, which makes it easy for him to access everything.
He says doing everything with dedication helps.
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“When something happens when you’re young, it makes you a bit smarter. That’s why I like it that a child with a disability played with normal children. That’s where you pick up many skills, and that’s where you’ll stand up for yourself because you don’t want to be left behind.”
Matheatau also sells his coffee at events and hopes that one day he will own his own coffee shop.
