With the calloused end of a single finger, Miles Forma is putting the vast majority of the rest of us to shame.
Wheelchair-bound, robbed of his speech and most other movement by cerebral palsy, the 17-year-old Forma could be understandably focused — fixated, even — on the trials and tribulations in his own life. Instead, this disabled teenager has opted to take on a more global perspective and some of the world’s problems to boot.
To wit: After seeing Hotel Rwanda on his winter break earlier this year, Forma didn’t simply "tsk-tsk" about the tragedy of it all. "It made me sad and angry that no one was helping the people of Rwanda, so I decided to do something about it," Forma explained via a computerized voice emulator called Dynavox, the same technology that allowed him to chant Hebrew passages at his bar mitzvah a couple years back. Though these amplified words had the unmistakably inhuman texture of any modern corporate call center, they were nevertheless laden with sincere emotion.