The online news site, InkFreeNews, carries a story today about CapeAble, a business began by Marna Pacheco and Susan Hickok. (Marna is a member of the Winona Lake, Ind., Grace Brethren Church, Bruce Barlow, lead pastor.) A portion of the story appears below. Click here for the complete article.
WINONA LAKE RESIDENT PROVES EVERYONE IS ‘CAPE’ABLE
Marna Pacheo, Winona Lake, believes each life has a purpose, including that of her daughter, Millie.
Pacheo and her husband adopted Millie, now 9, from China when she was about 2 years old. At birth, Millie had two traits working against her — being female and having a cleft lip and palate, both deemed undesirable in her culture. As a result, Millie faced abuse and neglect that left her permanently scarred inside.
“When we brought her home, she was diagnosed with complex developmental trauma disorder,” Pacheo said. “It’s an extreme form of post-traumatic stress disorder.”
To this day, Millie is mostly nonverbal and struggles with sensory integration. Wanting to do all she could, Pacheo, at the suggestion of Millie’s occupational therapist, went online to look at weighted garments, designed to calm children with sensory disorders. What she found, however, was not satisfactory to her.
“I was very appalled at how institutional things were,” she said. “They were like straight jackets. Millie had been at the orphanage two years of her life and I really didn’t want to put something on her that looked like what she had come from.”
The garments also did not stay on when Millie wanted to stand up.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if she had some kind of cape that she could walk, run, go to the store and go to church with, yet have it on to feel safe and help her control her behaviors.”
Pacheo contacted Susan Hickok, Fort Wayne, whom she had met through the process of adopting Millie. She wanted to know if Hickok knew of any seamstresses from the Fort Wayne area who could help design the weighted capes. As it turned out, Hickok graduated with a degree in pattern making and design.
The two set to work designing and marketing weighted capes. They dubbed their business, “CapeAble,” a play on words taking into account the product and its meaning.
Click here to read the complete article.