Treena's Story.

My name is Treena Guy. I have Cerebral Palsy. I lived at Rideau Regional Centre from the time I was 3 years old until I was 18 years old.

When I was a child at this time, I was not able to go to school because I did not have any way to communicate. Someone came to Rideau Regional Centre with Blissymbols for us to try them. When we learned Blissymbol, we could say anything that we wanted to.

Then I moved to Ottawa to Parkway House; this is a home for adults whom are physically disabled. When I moved here I started going to McArthur High School. At this school, I was doing many different things like some reading and numbers work, also science and geography.

After that, I started going to Fisher High School for each afternoon. At this school I took law, family studies and also English. My aide read to me what the teacher gave out to us because I was not able to read on my own but I did know how to do that work.

When I finished these two schools, I heard about the school called Parkway Adult Day School. At this school, I was working on reading but it was not so easy to get in there because I needed an aide to come with me and Parkway Adult Day School does not have or did not have aides.

We had to find some friends and my sister said they would come to help me. I am not going there now because it was too much for the teacher to have us. She was not able to handle all of us without any help. My home gave an aide to come with us but when they were not able to come, we could not go to school.

After all that I wanted to go to Algonquin to their upgrading program. I have been waiting for about two years but I still want to get in there.

I was able to take an interesting course at night school in child psychology. I do work at the Y on the computer. I do many different things on the computer. Each Tuesday, I help with a woman who uses Blissymbol. I make up some questions for her and she has to answer on her table. Also right now I am putting a book on the computer for persons who maybe have some difficulty turning pages.

Now I am going to try to tell you what some people do when they see a person who uses a Blissymbol table. They often times talk loudly to us. This bothers me because I do not like it. If I have someone with me, the other person will talk like I am not there. In school if the teacher wanted to ask me a question, she all the time asked my aide to give me the question. This makes me angry. I can understand everything and I can use my bliss table to answer.

Treena Guy.