"Oprah's Big Give" includes contestant who is a wheelchair user

The new ABC reality series "Oprah's Big Give," which will have 10 contestants competing to make dreams come true for strangers, features a young woman who is a wheelchair user as one of the contestants. The show begins March 2.

In addition to Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Production's involvement, Bertram van Munster and Elise Doganieri, the creators and producers of the five-time Emmy Award-winning series, "The Amazing Race," are acting as executive producers for the series.

"The Amazing Race" has a good track record (pun intended) with reaching out for diverse contestants. Little person, Charla Faddoul of Maryland, and her cousin, Mirna Hindoyan Buchinski, competed in the 5th season of the show as well as the All Stars show.

I heard Charla and Mirna speak about their experiences in fall of 2007, and Charla said, "The Amazing Race" specifically put out a call to the little people community to encourage them to try out for the show. She saw the call on a little person listserve. She and Mirna planned the videotape they sent to show producers carefully so as to illustrate that Charla was strong and fit enough to handle the race. Charla said when they made it through to the in-person audition, the cousins continued to emphasize to still skeptical producers that Charla could handle the race.

Charla and Mirna knew that any running involved in the show would put Charla at a disadvantage. "You are running against a regular-sized person that you know you can't beat," Charla said in Towson University's The Towerlight. (Both women are Towson U grads.) So their strategy to compensate for this obstacle was to fly smart. They always tried to book flights that would put them at the next destination ahead of other contestants.

The cousins were both born in Syria and speak fluent Armenian, which would sometimes anger their fellow contestants who wouldn't know what they were saying to each other. Charla said in her CBS biography that she hoped in her time on the show she could "show the world what I can do and break all stereotypes about dwarfs!”

And she and Mirna did show the world what they could do when they can close to winning "The Amazing Race -- All Stars." (They came in third.) A student of mine from Malaysia says Charla and Mirna are like rock stars there because the show is so popular.

So kudos to Oprah or whichever producer decided to include a contestant with a disability on "Oprah's Big Give." I am not much of a reality show watcher but I may just have to tune in.