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Lightning strikes City home NATASHA JONES Times Reporter
Talented musician Ella Yu plays both the violin and the piano. Blind since birth, the nine-yearold relies on feeling and sound to play her instruments. Miranda GATHERCOLE/ Langley Times
Feeling the music
Blindness doesn’t stop nine-year-old from doing what she loves MIRANDA GATHERCOLE Times Reporter
E
lla Yu runs into the waiting room of the Langley Community Music School with her arms stretched out, feeling every object in front of her — a chair, a table, a pencil, a camera bag. “What’s this?” she asks, as she runs her tiny hands over a tripod before sitting down in a stiff black chair. Ella’s curiosity is uncontrollable. Having been blind since birth, the nine-year-old must know every detail about everything around her. “Do you write on the back of your pages in your notebook?” she asks,
after hearing the page of a notepad turn. “Do you skip a line or do you just keep it on one line? Do you keep it spaced out or do you do it in paragraph format, without needing to line space?” It’s minute details that she asks about, and yet these are very important for her to be able to visualize the world she lives in. Ella was born premature and had difficulties breathing. She was sent to the neonatal intensive care unit where doctors put her in an induced sleep for three weeks, and pumped her with medicine and oxygen to ensure her survival. But it wasn’t until she gradually recovered and was about to be sent home that doctors noticed there was something wrong with her eyes.They soon discovered that her retinas were detached. She was blind. It isn’t known if this happened before she was born or during her
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treatment after birth. At first, she had light reception in both eyes, but over the years, her left eye has worsened and has lost all sense of sight, though she can still see light through her right eye. But Ella doesn’t let this hinder her from doing all the activities other nine-year-olds do. In fact, in some areas, such as music, she is far more advanced than average kids her age. Ella, who calls North Delta home, has been attending the Langley Community Music school for two years. She began playing the piano when she was four, and when her teacher moved to Scotland, came to Langley to continue her lessons. At this time she took up the violin as well. For her, playing music is all about feeling and sound. “The piano is quite thick and then the violin is quite thin,” she said, comparing the two instruments.“The
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piano might seem thicker than any other instrument because it rings quite a bit. If you play piano in certain places it would ring a lot. And the violin (rings) only when you’re in a really big room and there’s tons of echoes. “I think the violin is more interesting. I can do more things with the violin than the piano.There can by melody, voices can be shifted and could be made different and there can be many different tones played.” Because she cannot read sheet music, Ella has been taught to play through the Suzuki program, which concentrates on mimicking sounds. It is known as the mother-tongue method, following the idea that if every child knows how to speak their mother’s language, then when they listen to music they can pick up the sounds the same way they do when
A house near Al Anderson Pool was struck by lightning on Tuesday night, frying a computer, phone and TV as a spectacular storm ripped through Langley and the Lower Mainland. Resuming again early Wednesday, the storm left dozens of residences without electricity. B.C. Hydro reported that pockets of Langley Township still had no power on Wednesday morning.These included Clovermeadow Crescent, the 8000 block of Glover Road, the 23500 block of River Road, and an area of Brookswood centered around 202 Street and 28 Avenue. Despite the ferocious storm, the Township fire department had a relatively quiet night, said spokesman Bruce Ferguson. In Langley City, all the action seemed to come at once with crews responding to four calls in four minutes, said fire chief Rory Thompson. Firefighters were called to the 5300 block of 207 Street after residents reported a lightning strike which set a fir tree on fire. By the time firefighters arrived, the flames were out.The strike sheared off the top half of the tree which was near a playground. Thompson and Ferguson said that there were no injuries reported as a result of the storm.
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