Teenage girl melts hearts with mid-flight acts of kindness

Teenage girl melts hearts with mid-flight acts of kindness
By laurencroft


Passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles have been entertained by an act of kindness from 15-year-old Clara Daly, as she assisted another passenger who was both blind and deaf.

We, unfortunately, don’t get to write such sweet stories like this very much, so excuse us while we continue to process what happened.

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Tim Cook, who is blind and deaf, was travelling home from visiting his sister in Boston and struggled to communicate with the cabin crew.

In an attempt to meet Cook’s needs, a flight attendant requested over the intercom if any passengers on board knew sign language.

Daly, who is dyslexic and recently learnt sign language to help her communicate, responded to the call and knelt next to Cook to begin using sign language by gesturing into the palm of his hand.

As per CBS Los Angeles, Daly said: “I pressed the call button, and then she came, and she said ‘so we have a passenger on the plane who’s blind and deaf, so do you know how to finger spell?’ And I was like, ‘yeah I totally know how to finger spell.’”

“They thought that he might need something and they weren’t sure how to communicate,” she said.

“He like didn’t need anything. He was just like lonely and wanted to talk.”

“I was thinking ‘wow this is really cool, I hope I don’t spell anything wrong’,” she added.

“English is already a hard language for me.”

To add to this, Daly was confused as to why her story was gaining so much traction.

“Doing something like that is just like what anyone would have done.”

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Jane Daly, the mother of Clara Daly who was assisting Cook, took to Facebook to share what had happened.

“He asked her lots of questions and she signed-spelled the answers into his hand,” she wrote.

“The flight attendants and the passengers around him were all taken by Clara.”

Another passenger on the flight, Lynette Scribner, also posted on Facebook.

“It was fascinating to watch as she (Clara) signed one letter at a time into his hand,” she wrote.

“He was able to ‘read’ her signing and they carried on an animated conversation.”

Daly visited Cook three times during the flight to help him ask for water, update him on when the flight was arriving and then for the last hour they simply spoke about their backgrounds.

“It was a beautiful reminder, in this time of too much awfulness, that there are still good, good people who are willing to look out for each other,” Scribner added.

Daly and her mother’s original flight was cancelled, consequently being put on a connecting flight that Daly believed was meant to be “so that she could be there to help this man”.

As per Fox News, Cook reportedly told Alaska Airlines it was the best flight he had ever been on.

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