GUIDE WORK IN VANCOUVER

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27576, 5 February 1955, Page 2

GUIDE WORK IN VANCOUVER

AID FOR HANDICAPPED GIRLS

Miss Marjorie Menzies, an active member of the Girl Guide movement in British Columbia, has been spending a few days in Christchurch and has exchanged views with Christchurch guides. Miss Menzies is an extension commissioner of Girl Guides in Vancouver and she works with handicapped guides—those who are blind, deaf, or crippled to a greater or less degree. “The movement is flourishing in British Columbia,” said Miss Menzies in an interview yesterday. “The children are very keen, but, like many other countries, we are short of leaders.” With five guiders to help her. Miss Menzies visits children in hospitals and homes and instructs them in the principles of guiding. With deaf children, she uses blackboards and pictures to help in the lessons, and most of. the children can lip read. She-finds them surprisingly easy to teach and is proud of the fact that eight deaf guides took their places with children of normal hearing in an examination for the golden hand, and all passed and are now first-class brownies. Three or four times a year Miss Menzies visits a solarium on Vancouver Island, about 84 miles from the city of Vancouver. She has very good guiders on the island and they care for crippled children in the solarium, which is not large. It accommodates 48 child patients suffering from tuberculous hips or other crippling diseases, and many post-poliomyelitis cases. These children are keen guides. Miss Menzies finds that there are, in her district, fewer blind children than deaf and crippled children. In one institution that she visits there are 80 deaf and 20 blind children, and that, she thinks, would be the proportion throughout British Columbia Before coming to the South Island, Miss Menzies attended a camp for handicapped guides at Arahina. near Marton. Among the 20 girls at the camp were one blind, two deaf, six in wheel chairs, four on crutches, and four of low intelligence. “I was greatly impressed,” Miss Menzies said, “it was a happy and successful camp.” With her father, who is a New Zealander, Miss Menzies is touring New Zealand and today she will leave for Tapanui to visit an aunt and uncle. Mr Menzies, who spent his boyhood at Tapanui, the Dominion in