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People will adopt older kids. They'll adopt disabled kids and neglected kids. Kids who can't read, kids who can't talk - there are people willing to adopt.
But all those things in one child? CBS News Correspondent Steve Hartman reports there are few who want that.
Born blind, Pandu (pictured) was dumped at a hospital gate in India. At the orphanage, he was the one child who was there year after year, until last year. That's when the 5-year-old got swept up by a Denver couple who said he was just what they were looking for: a little boy with his father's eyes.
Jason Fayre (pictured) teaches blind people how to be self-sufficient. So when he and his wife Lalena, who can see, decided to adopt they chose not to just give any child a home, but to give one special child a real chance - a chance he would have never had otherwise.
"I think we can offer something to a blind child that maybe a lot of other families can't," said Jason.
Pandu is so much better than when they got him. After 5 years in a crib with virtually no human contact, they say Pandu was almost wild. But a year later he's in a mainstream preschool, and he's beginning to speak for the very first time. He's even learning the finer points of picking out a pumpkin.
Of course, he chose a Braille one; like father like son.
"Pandu and him have always kind of had this connection," said Lalena.
Although it'll be years before Pandu can fully appreciate the enormity of his good fortune, there's no doubt he understands something pretty special is happening to him.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From CBS News:
