A long journey

THIS CHINESE man is bound to be every woman’s dream man, err, dream son. 26-year-old Fan Meng, was so determined to make his disabled mother happy that he took her on an arduous 3,500km journey on foot.

By (WORLD WISE)

Published: Sat 27 Oct 2012, 9:21 PM

Last updated: Fri 3 Apr 2015, 1:59 AM

The mother’s dream vacation from Beijing to Xishuangbanna in the Yunnan province took the duo a 100 days, he on foot and she in a wheel chair but they are thrilled it worked out for them.

The mother, Kou, who suffers from paralysis had been unable to travel for several years but when she learnt about Xishuangbanna from a television programme, she ate her heart out about visiting it. The fond son decided to make his mother’s dream come true.

In July he quit his salesperson’s job in an electronics firm and took off with his mother and the pet dog, traveling through Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou among others before arriving at their destination. Along the way, they spent the night in their tent or in cheap hotels but they still ended up spending 8000 yuan to get to their destination.

The duo’s journey was made comfortable and happy by the kindness of strangers along the way who gave them warm meals and hospitality.

“Without my son, I was afraid I could never have made it here. I feel my son has become more mature along the journey,” she said recently of her adventure.

Fan, meanwhile, blogged about the journey, recording his experiences along the way. The blog has since become a hit with on-line readers.

A slap in the face of Facebook

We don’t know what to make of techie Maneesh Sethi but we can tell you right away that we understand the reason behind his rather strange behaviour recently.

We are speaking about this young man’s decision to hire a woman whose only job is to keep him from spending time on Facebook while he has work to do. We all know the dangers of keeping our Facebook and other social networking sites open whilst at work. A quick 10- minute session becomes a few hours lost in chatting before we realise it and there is hell to pay because we missed some deadline at work.

Sethi decided enough was enough and advertised on Craigslist for a “slapper” who would remind him to get back to work and not waste time on FB. Sethi’s move came after he realised that he spent an average of 29 hours every week on social networking sites.

The man now pays a woman $8 an hour to do this job but it is well worth it because he says his productivity has spiked by 98 per cent since then. Sethi, however, says that it is not all about slapping here.

“I found that speaking out loud and trying to explain your work to someone else actually helped me to understand what I was trying to say, what I was trying to do.Even when she (hired slapper) didn’t know the best way, she would ask me questions—and that helped shape my path.”

Opening her eyes to music

A 66-YEAR old British grandmother has discovered a rather musical way to cope with a medical condition that causes her eyes to stay shut at all times. Moira Gleed had to keep her eyes closed at all times to avoid pain till one day she realised that breaking out into a song actually helped her keep her eyes open!

Focal dystonia is a muscle condition in which a spasm causes the eye lids to keep shut. It caused the lady to give up her job: “My eyes used to get incredibly red and inflamed my eyelids would just involuntary close,” she recalled recently. “But one day at my choir practice, I was singing my heart out and all of a sudden I realised I could see the conductor. My eyes were open. It was fantastic!”

Even botox injections, that are used to relieve muscle spasm, did not help her condition but when she realised that singing could change her condition, her joy was boundless.

“I suppose it is quite unusual,” she said recently of her miraculous discovery. Her family, meanwhile , is singing a lot more these days… and so is she!