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A 22-year-old Vancouver woman with cerebral palsy has started her own flower business after a volunteer engineer made a gizmo that enables her to strip leaves and cut stems with one hand.
Rebekah McGeer, 22, pictured, needed the device to be able to run Firefly Flowers. McGeer can only use of half of her body and cannot feel her left arm.
Her disability made arranging flowers into bouquets an enormous challenge. That was until engineer Marvin Pflug fashioned McGeer's device out of an old BMX bike break and some rubber.
"She has no finger control. So in order to hold a flower stem, she needs to hold it with something, so we came up with a clamping device," said Pflug.
The idea came from many years of helping his children fix their bicycles, he said.
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 Canwest News Service:
