The Smile that Breaks Your Heart

The Westing Game
Cristos Theodorakis has a smile that “breaks your heart.” Although I can’t see his smile, my heart breaks when I read of how he is treated by people with good intentions. An adolescent invalid confined to a wheelchair, many people speak to him as though he were a toddler, believing that his mind is as handicapped as his body. For the past three summers I have been a witness to this very thing. I have volunteered for a week at a camp for people with mental and/or physical disabilities. The campers are all so diverse with their handicaps as well as with their personalities. One with cerebral palsy with the intelligence of you and I is spoken to as if (s)he were a child, and that isn’t okay to be done at a camp where it may be their one chance of the entire year to be “normal.” My heart reaches out to Cristos.