By Shana Benzinane & Christina D’Auria
In Yangquan, China, a baby is born without fingers and is left at the steps of an orphanage.
A family in Duluth, Ga., decides it may be time to grow.
Meantime, six girls descend from a fir tree in Ames, Iowa, with the answer to a very serious problem.
What do these souls have in common? At first blush, nothing. But a deeper look reveals a common bond that will tie them for a lifetime.
Like many enduring ideas, this story has its beginnings on a napkin.
Dale Fairchild and her adopted daughter, Danielle, were united when Danielle was a toddler. This beautiful brown-skinned baby, with silky, black hair, was born without fingers on her dominant hand. For that reason she was deemed a “special needs” child and began life without a mother’s love and without a proper bed to lie in.
The Fairchild family had been waiting to adopt for more than two years – short compared to the near-decade other families typically wait for “non special-needs” children.
When the phone call came, Dale was sorting cookies with the Girl Scouts. She excitedly wrote down the agency’s information on a napkin – and rushed out of the meeting into the February air to begin the adoption journey.
The adoption was finalized when Danielle was nearly 2. Dale fondly remembered the first time she met her daughter in a dark, smog-filled coal-mining village in Northern China. The orphanage sat on a quiet, dirt road.
According to Dale, the newest member of the Fairchild family had an energy about her; she was a ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy place.
“Danielle was sassy,” she said.
The family traveled home with their toddler, who easily adjusted to her new surroundings and siblings. To make Danielle’s transition as easy as possible, Dale researched and connected on Yahoo! with other families affected by limb differences. Although Dale had professional experience working with children who had special needs, she had never dealt with them in her personal life.
Nine-hundred miles away, in Iowa, a team called the “Flying Monkeys” was on a quest to solve a real-world biomedical engineering challenge, assigned to them in their FIRST LEGO League season called “Body Forward.”
Read the full article here.