WINSTON-SALEM -- Industries for the Blind is the largest employer of people who are blind or visually impaired in the United States. 

Eustace Mac-Thompson lost his sight in 1996.  

"The saying always goes, 'As long as there's life, there's hope.'"  

Mac-Thompson was living in Sierra Leone when he found out he had a tumor on his optic nerve. The surgery he needed wasn't available in his country, so he traveled to the United States, but it was too late. The tumor had already damaged too much of his vision.  

"I've lost my sight, it's gone now,” said Mac-Thompson. “I have to try and see how best I can live without having sight at all, and that's what I've been doing."  

As if it weren't enough of a struggle to adapt to his new lifestyle, he knew he also had to get a job so he could get the rest of his family to the U.S. He was forced to leave his children behind with a relative.  

That's when he found IFB.  

"A gentleman brought me in the mattress department, took my hand, placed it on top of a mattress already done and said, 'This is what you're going to be doing.' And I tell you that was the greatest shock because I thought, 'How am I going to do this, make a mattress?'"  

However, within five days, he was making mattresses alongside more than 20 other blind employees.  

"Since 1936, mattresses have played a vital part in Industries for the Blind,” said IFB’s executive director David Horton. “From the days where we were making mattresses with six employees in a two room workshop." 

Now, they operate a retail mattress store that’s serving an entire community.  

Horton said the employees fuel the board member’s fire every day to keep on pushing hard. 

The team produces an average of 200 mattresses a day and more than 50,000 each year. 

"I love doing what I'm doing, and I love making mattresses,” said Mac-Thompson.  
 
Horton said Mac-Thompson’s enthusiasm shows.  

"Eustace is such a great addition and part of IFB, and we're proud to have him,” said Horton. 
 
IFB’s mattress store is at the Winston-Salem campus just off of North Point Drive.  

It also has contracts to provide mattresses to military bases around the world, hospitals, colleges and fire stations.