Meet Joseph Matheatau, South Africa’s first blind barista [video]

Joseph Matheatau dreams of one day opening his very own coffee shop in Bloemfontein. While that might sound like a dream many have, Matheatau’s story is a little bit different. He is South Africa’s first ever blind barista.

Trained by the Truth Coffee shop in Cape Town in 2014, with the help od Kaleidoscope, Matheatau has suffered a lot of adversity. When he was young, he was sometimes told that he was “too lazy to see” and go to school. His teachers used to make jokes about his sight. He was still in school when he was 24.

He lost his sight completely eight years later, but he enrolled as a student for a Marketing and Entrepreneurship course at the Institute for the Blind in 2014.

Now, he’s working towards realising his dream of having his own coffee shop.

“Visitors can not believe that their coffee was made by a blind person. It was not an easy process though. In the very beginning I had a few incidents where I burned myself,” he says while pointing to a few scars on his arms. “It was a nightmare learning to froth the milk! But today, after successfully preparing a cup of coffee, I get the smell of success.”