Brave Girl Talia Geliebter of Berkeley won $250 for her spunk in the face of hardship. She shared the limelight with three other contest winners, ages 14 to 17. Talia’s friend, Jacqueline Burbank of Kensington, won the same amount for writing the essay nominating Talia.
Certainly not all little girls are brave enough to swing from a trapeze, scuba dive and climb a ropes course. But Talia, who is disabled, has never let her wheelchair bar her from such challenges.
Nobody could have dreamed she would accomplish such feats when she was born 15 weeks premature and weighed in at one and a half pounds.
Jacqueline was lucky to have remained in the womb long enough to develop like most children. But Talia, born with underdeveloped lungs and a damaged central nervous system, has struggled to do what comes naturally to other kids. She keeps pace intellectually with others her age. But the youngster has relied on a wheelchair since the age of 3, when she failed to walk. (In recent months, she took her first determined steps with a walker.)
“We were both lucky to have the best doctors in the world,” writes Jacqueline in her essay. “They made us stronger, `plumped us up,’ as my Mom used to say.”
Before a crowd of 100 at the San Francisco Main, Talia accepted her cash prize from newscaster Wendy Tokuda. She told the audience that despite her handicap, she likes to do the kinds of things that other kids do.
“I have a bicycle with three wheels and…I like going fast down hills with my Dad. I like swimming, baseball and riding horses,” she told them.
The spirited youth has never shirked a daring stunt when given the chance, her parents say. From hoisting herself atop playground monkey bars — with a little help — to accompanying a trapeze trainer on a circus swing high above the ground and attending Jewish summer camp, Talia is determined to get the most out of life.
Her parents, Robin Keller and Mark Geliebter, say they don’t know where their daughter gets her courage. They try to make her childhood as normal as possible by sending her to public school and Hebrew school and encouraging her to take risks.
They have told her of the atrocities endured by her grandparents during the Holocaust. They related how frightened they were when she was born prematurely. Their efforts aside, Mark Geliebter said, Talia draws her strength primarily from inner reserves.
Her strength has taught her friend Jacqueline something about bravery.
Talia “had hip surgery right before I broke my arm and I saw that she wasn’t crying that much, so when I had my arm surgery, I knew it wouldn’t be so scary,” Jacqueline said.
Jacqueline actually had three surgeries to her arm the summer of 1996 after a miscalculated cartwheel fractured her arm bones in three places. It was a time when the entire family had to be brave. Two grandparents had recently died of cancer and Jacqueline’s father, Scot Burbank, subsequently discovered a malignant tumor in his side.
“My husband was in one hospital and she was in the other,” her mother, Arlene Burbank said, noting that the ordeal was one of the scariest of her life. She attributes her own resilience to her parents, who “weathered a lot of storms in their lives. They brought me up to look back in order to get the courage to keep going.”
Perhaps for that reason the Brave Little Girls contest struck a personal note when Jacqueline’s mother first read about it in the newspaper. The S.F. contest follows a national library initiative to celebrate both fictional brave girls in literature as well as real-life girls who have shown unusual courage. Inspired by the contest, Arlene Burbank urged her daughter to think of a brave girl to write about.
At the library reception, newscaster Tokuda said Talia’s courage must have come from a strong gene pool.
Jacqueline says family and friends have a lot to do with her bravery. And Talia says she admires the brave girls in the “American Girl” book series.
“If I were to put it up in four equal quarters,” Jacqueline said, “half [of my bravery] is from my parents. A quarter from friends and the other quarter comes from myself.”