Work Again

 

     Our daughter and our whole family hoped that her summer of self-employment at "Hayley's Garden" would turn into an employment opportunity and it has! With the support and help of Sources Community Centre, WorkBC and her employer, she now has a great job and we could not be happier for her. Our daughter did benefit from the resume, skills assessment and interview assistance given her. And the fact of her disability meant that she qualified for a wage subsidy for the period of her training and probation which probably made her a more attractive candidate as far as her employer was concerned. The employer was amenable to the hours that our daughter wanted to work and that flexibility was crucial. The end result is that she has a place to go every day where she can work hard, feel valued and get paid as well. What a blessing!

     It is a fact that it is hard for a disabled person to find regular, steady, paying employment. I know many mothers and fathers of special needs kids who would love to see their adult children find work. An employer does have to be able and willing to support an additional needs employee, especially initially and that might mean a longer training period but the payoff is well worth it. It is commonly known that disabled employees are loyal and tend to stay with their employers, saving on training costs in the long run. As Doug Tennant, Executive Director of Semiahmoo House pointed out in a recent article in our local paper, “The benefit is that employees who have disabilities have been demonstrated to be much more loyal. They will stay in their job a lot longer. If you look at restaurants and other hospitality industries, the amount of money they have to put into recruitment and retention is monumental.”

     Our daughter loves her job and I am sure will stay satisfied with it because it is something she really wants to do. She discovered her desire to work with plants and flowers over the course of her over-year when SACL and the Surrey School District encouraged her to make goals for herself and then go after them. It really was a collaborative process that brought her to this point in her life and we are all so grateful for this new opportunity. And to be twenty-one months seizure-free on top of it....wow!

     

Nephew

     Many families have a story of the tragic loss of a young person, gone before their time, a death without reason, without purpose, one that defies understanding. Such is the case of our family now. We have lost a nephew, a cousin, a young man of such promise and potential that it cannot be overstated; he was one of our best and brightest. And we are sad beyond measure and struggling with the senselessness of it all.
     The death of this young man has devastated all of us who knew him; we are many and we are bereft. He was such a good boy, a caring son, grandson and brother, a faithful friend, an excellent student and a person of integrity and worth. He was fun and funny and had a wonderful sense of humour; his smile could light up any room. He loved music and motors; he knew how things worked. He had recently packed his belongings and moved to another state to start his courses in computer engineering. Even in his short time there he had made an impact. He had made friends. His memorial service there was witness to this fact.
    Our nephew was killed in a motorcycle accident. It happened as a result of an immense error in judgement made not by him but by the driver of the car that hit him. Every morning when we wake up, we have forgotten and then we remember and know again that he is gone. And we are never the same.
     We love you Jordan, we miss you. And we always will.....

Please sign the petition to prevent more needless deaths: https://chn.ge/2CcphBI

Club

     Books and reading have always been important to me. I remember when I was a girl balancing a flashlight under the covers while secretly reading a Nancy Drew mystery well past the time I should have been asleep. There was and still is nothing I like better than a good book: mysteries, biographies, historical novels, I love them all. So I was particularly happy when our eldest daughter began to show an interest in books. Reading has never been especially easy for her; her learning disorder makes phonics difficult. She relies on her memory of a word seen before to make sense of it. She is not a fast reader but steady and regular.
     The book club she is part of is a great encouragement. Her friend's mother came up with the idea and it is brilliant. Several of her friends who are of a similar reading level and with like interests read the book and then get together to watch the movie and discuss aspects of the book with questions that can be found on-line. We take turns picking the book and hosting the evening.
     Their last book club meeting was hosted as a tea party in honour of the classic Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The girls dressed up as their favourite character and the tea treats were reminiscent of the book's details: checkerboard sandwiches and flagged cupcakes, tarts with hearts and cheese and tomato toadstools, what a spread! We all ate like queens and had a marvelous time. The mums even got a chance to chat while the movie was playing! Yay! The only thing better than a good book is a book which becomes even more meaningful when shared with others. We are better together...