Alanda Travillion grew up loving reading, and she enjoys passing that love on to young people.
Travillion is a leader in Jennings Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church’s after-school tutoring program, which is now in its fourth year. Ruth Gilland, who oversees the program with Travillion, had approached her with a plan for setting up the tutoring, and she liked the idea.
“My thing is reading, and I feel like children don’t read enough,” Travillion said. “If they read more, they would, I think, do better in school all around — because reading would expose them to new vocabulary, different places in the world, increase the ability to critically think and problem solve. And those are skills that they will need in any subject area.”
The work can be a challenge, but Travillion knows about challenges.
In 1997, she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a group of rare eye disorders that caused her vision to deteriorate — and by 2002, she had lost her vision completely. So she doesn’t get to enjoy books as much as she used to, although Kindle devices do give the blind some options.
But she said her faith has helped her cope, and she is staying active.
“All my life, I’ve been told that God doesn’t put any more on you than you can bear, so I just figured he knew that I would be able to handle it,” she said. “And so I just had faith that I was able to do whatever it was I needed to do.”
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Travillion, 54, was born in Greenwood and educated in the city school system, graduating from Greenwood High in 1980. She had been interested in a legal career and went on to Tougaloo College, where she majored in English and minored in journalism, but she eventually decided law wasn’t what she wanted to do.
She left school, married in 1983 and lived in Jackson for a time before moving to Waco, Texas, where she attended nursing school at McLennan Community College.
“I always liked taking care of people, so I decided that that would be a good thing to do,” said Travillion, who had worked as a nurse’s assistant at Greenwood Leflore Hospital in high school.
After graduating from McLennan in 1990, she worked in the cardiopulmonary intensive care unit at a hospital in Waco and then moved to Bryan/College Station, Texas, where she worked in a dialysis center and then was director of professional services for a home health agency. She moved to Dallas and kept working for that agency at a new branch office, staying until 1998. From there she went to San Antonio in 2001 and returned to Greenwood in 2006.
She was diagnosed with RP after telling a doctor she was having trouble seeing colors. Because colorblindness is rare in women, he sent her to a retina specialist, and after “what seemed like millions of tests and poking in your eye,” they made their diagnosis, she said.
According to the National Eye Institute, it is generally estimated that RP affects roughly 1 in 4,000 people. Doctors told Travillion they had no idea how long her vision loss would take. Also, "it’s hereditary, and we don’t know anybody in our family with retinitis pigmentosa, so it was shocking,” she said.
Since she had three children, she had no choice but to adjust quickly. In fact, she said, she probably continued driving longer than she should have, just because her family needed it. But she also got help to prepare for her future.
She went to the Dallas Lighthouse for the Blind and got in touch with the Texas Commission for the Blind, which sent her a teacher to help with daily activities and another to help with orientation and mobility training.
“We walked and walked and walked and walked and walked around my neighborhood, so that I would be familiar with ambulating through my neighborhood,” she said.
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Travillion moved to Greenwood to be closer to her mother, Lillie Russell. Divorced since 2004, she can live independently and do tasks such as cooking and laundry, and her mother and friends take her to the grocery store and other places when needed. She enjoyed going on walks when she lived in Texas but doesn’t do that as much in Greenwood because of the shortage of sidewalks.
She said she is glad to be in Jennings Temple, the church she grew up in and “a wonderful church family.” She now works regularly with children, who come in about once a month on Saturdays to hear Bible stories and take part in arts and crafts activities.
But she is particularly interested in the tutoring program, which now has 44 students enrolled. Some of them will be leaving to receive tutoring in their schools, but overall, “we’ve gotten an excellent response to the program this year,” she said.
They also have enough volunteers — including church members, retired educators and Mississippi Valley State University students — that the children can receive one-on-one attention.
“I want to see our children be able to read on or above grade level,” Travillion said. “I think that’s going to be very important in these state tests that they’re taking. I just want to see children read and be exposed to all kinds of information.”
In her spare time, she enjoys television game shows and follows politics. She also is considering writing a novel one day.
In general, she considers herself a lifelong learner and hopes to “travel and learn and do as many things as I can.”
• Contact David Monroe at 581-7236 or dmonroe@gwcommonwealth.com.
