WHEN Sun.Star Cebu first featured Catherine Unger in June 2004, she was a 21-year-old English sophomore who couldn’t keep secrets and wanted to become a journalist.
A special student—not for her quirks but for the glaucoma that left her with only partial visibility—Cathy was articulate and sociable, confiding to the Sun.Star reporter, whom she met only for the first time, that she loved to download music from the Blue Mountain website, as well as keep in touch with friends through her mobile phone.
(After memorizing the arrangement of icons in her keypad, she could pin in her own text messages but—she cautioned Sun.Star—she could not keep secrets because someone always had to read aloud all her incoming messages.)
The voracious reader of novels (converted into raised patterns of dots by the Cebu Braille Center Inc., which convinced her mother to enroll Cathy in Braille lessons at the age of seven) and composer of poems and journal entries had a dream of becoming, after college, a journalist or a teacher.
More than a love for words, she wanted to “communicate” to her fellow disabled that, by accepting who they are, they can move on and become better.
“Come what may, I want to work in anything related to communication” was Cathy’s aspiration, quoted in Sun.Star’s June 28, 2004 editorial.
Wings
Nearly four years after that coverage, Sun.Star met Cathy again in a room with bars on the windows and the door.
Hinges and locks squeak as the visitors enter. Delia Mińoza, coordinator of the Special Education (Sped) Center of the Mandaue City Central School, explains that these are precautionary measures placed in this room where computer classes are conducted for disabled students by a teacher who is one of them.
Turning to the racket, Cathy’s face is expectant but polite. But when she hears the name of the paper and the reporter’s greeting, her face lights up as she recalls the exact date, place and circumstances of the first interview. She inquires about the chief photographer who took her photos, which she never saw but had to ask her grandmother to describe to her.
Inquiring about an editor of the same paper who mentored her at the Cebu Normal University, the 25-year-old seems to be unchanged, as giddy and dreamy as she was in college.
It’s an illusion Cathy herself dispels: she is now totally blind. After the June 2004 interview, she suffered searing and unremitting head and eye pain. Prepared by her doctor, Cathy came to accept the eventual loss of her partial vision.
But though bereft of the shadows that had been her “vision” for two decades, Cathy did not wallow in despair. Last March 2007, she graduated with a Sped degree.
After hurdling setbacks and outright resistance from their own families and schools that restrict the access of persons with disabilities (PWDs) to inclusive education, many PWD graduates are again challenged by the stiff competition for jobs. Undaunted by unemployment after graduation, Cathy enrolled in a computer training course offered by the Resources for the Blind Inc.
In October 2007, seven months after she received her Sped diploma, Cathy fulfilled her dream of becoming a communicator.
Roots
Cathy has been the Sped teacher in computer technology at the Mandaue City Central School since October 2007.
Her salary is paid by Jose and Nena Gullas, who also equipped the school’s Sped computer laboratory with a P48,000 donation of computer equipment enabled with the Jaws software access program.
For Cathy’s students having low vision, total blindness, hearing impairment and learning disability, the Jaws technology opens their access to a computer through speech output and the use of keyboard commands instead of a mouse.
After handling Sped classes for enrollees, Cathy volunteers to help disabled out-of-school youths and alumni who are drawn to one of the few disabled-friendly computer labs in the province.
Visually impaired Noriel Mantos, 19, types, slowly, as if in prayer, the “apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus.” For alumnus Raul Cono, 26, medical relief from his low vision has been ruled out due to his advanced years and lack of finances.
But Raul comes nearly every afternoon to be guided by Cathy in learning basic Microsoft Office applications. Raul dreams of becoming employed someday.
That it should be Cathy guiding him is apt. Apart from computers, this girl knows more than a thing or two about dreaming.
