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BALTIMORE ― For some disabled children, a bicycle can mean a new life. Students at one Baltimore County school plan to give the gift of two wheels to disabled people in Ghana. It's a class project inspired by one athlete's story.
This is Emmanuel Yeboah's second visit to McDonogh School in Owings Mills. The first time was back in October, when he shared his story as a disabled person living in his native Ghana.
"It's considered to be a punishment from a deity and when he was a kid, his father abandoned him because he was disabled," said Kyle Rice.
And other family members told Yeboah's mother to kill him.
His right leg is severely deformed, but his mother wanted Yeboah to go to school. She carried him until he was 12 years old.
"She said, `Emmanuel, you are heavy,'" Yeboah said.
So he hopped, until the three-mile trek became too much.
Shortly after, Yeboah decided to apply for a bicycle from an athletic foundation in California. When the bike arrived, it meant freedom.
"It's changed my life totally, 100%," he said.
So Yeboah pedaled 400 miles across Ghana, raising awareness for the disabled.
He has a prosthesis now, but Yeboah's story impressed four McDonogh students.
Brendan Fowl, Danny Bredar, Kyle Rice and Ben Love decided to ask other students to donate bikes. The teens will personally deliver them to disabled children in Ghana.
"I think we're going to discover that the kids there are going to change our lives more than we could have ever imagined," Fowl said.
So far, they've filled a trailer with more than 200 bicycles. They will be accepting bikes for another two weeks.
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 WJZ-TV:
