(WHDH) – A California teenager stepped in to help a man who is blind and deaf on her flight home from Massachusetts.
Clara Daly and her mom were flying home from Mass. when a flight attendant asked if anyone knew American Sign Language.
“I pressed the call button, and then she came, and she was like said, ‘so, we have a passenger on the plane who’s blind and deaf, so do you know how to fingerspell?’ And I was like, ‘yeah I totally know how to fingerspell,’” Clara recalled.
She signed each letter in every word so that the man, seen in the photo above, could feel her hands.
“They thought that he might need something and they weren’t sure how to communicate,” Clara said.
She said the man, Tim, told her he would like a water and asked how much time was left in the flight.
He then asked for Clara again. “He like didn’t need anything. He was just like lonely and wanted to talk,” she said.
For the last hour of the flight, that’s exactly what the teenager did. “I was thinking wow this is really cool, I hope I don’t spell anything wrong,” she said.
Clara is dyslexic and only started learning sign language about a year ago.
“I saw sign language as a way to communicate without having to read and write,” she said.
Clara’s parents, Jane and Bill, said they are so proud of their daughter. Her mom was so proud, she posted about Monday’s flight on Facebook.
“I just felt like that was a story that people would want to hear,” Jane said.
Jane was right, many people did want to hear the story – Clara’s story has gone viral.
The teen said she found it weird that it was getting so much attention because she said, “doing something like that is just like what anyone would have done.”
Bill said sign language isn’t the only lesson people can learn from his daughter, he said people can learn “to open yourself up, to be there for others, and to look past our differences.”
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