Sacred Heart student Martina McManus, below with her mom, Kathleen, took this
prize-winning photo at the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.
Photos provided
By Emily J. Minor
She’s 11, which means she likes miniature golf and ocean waves, dance parties and spring break.
“She also loves to eat,” says John McManus, the father of fifth-grader Martina, a spit of a thing with her cute, short hair and happy smile.
Other stuff Martina McManus loves? iPads, iPods, iPhones. “Especially iPods,” says Martina, who recently won a photography contest after a school trip to the Everglades.
Of course, these days, everyone’s a photographer, right? Pink-and-blue sunsets and birds floating away on air. It’s easier than ever to capture the world around us, and share it with others.
But Martina — who placed third in the photo contest sponsored by the Arthur R. Marshall Foundation for The Everglades — has been doing it (at least part of the time) the old-fashioned way. With a digital camera and no Instagram filters.
“I like that everything looks closer,” said Martina, who said she loves flowers in bright colors such like purple, blue, yellow and pink.
The daughter of John and Kathleen McManus of South Palm Beach, Martina has an almost uncanny way of seeing the world, and here’s why: She was diagnosed with profound deafness at age 2½. For a few years, she wore hearing aids, with limited success. “You can’t speak until you hear,” said her dad.
Then, before Martina’s fifth birthday, she was equipped with a cochlear implant — a device embedded behind the ear that delivers electrical stimulation to the auditory nerves. In Martina’s case, the cochlear implant brought sound and speech into daily life.
She’s still hearing-impaired — a cochlear implant can only do so much. But today, she attends regular classes with her younger brother, John, 9, at Sacred Heart School in Lake Worth — a small, private school with a strong technology and environment-focused curriculum.
“It’s a godsend,” said her dad, about the cochlear devise.
“Whenever we lose a sense, the other senses take over,” says her father. “Her eyesight is absolutely phenomenal. Her powers of observations are just tremendous.”
And so it was that Martina traipsed off for the contest — called “The Everglades Through the Eyes of Children” — which gave students at Sacred Heart a chance to explore the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.
The McManus family didn’t realize it was a contest, said John, until they got a letter “out of the blue” that Martina had won.
Her third-place photo — a time-elapsed image that looks more like an impressionistic painting than a photograph snapped by a kid — was on display at the Worth Avenue Wally Findlay Galleries, where the winners and their families were honored with a reception in January.
Her prize? “A very nice digital camera,” said her father — so their little girl can go out there and capture the world, listening as she goes.
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