38-year-old Wesley Wee, from Singapore, was born with cerebral palsy, and has never had any control over most of the muscles in his body. He is stuck in a wheelchair, and is unable to dress or feed himself, so writing a book seems out of the realm of possibility. However, his physical disabilities didn’t stop this ambitious man from spending five years typing every letter in his inspiring book, “Finding Happiness Against the Odds”, with just the big toe on his right foot.

Growing up, Wesley had to deal no only with the challenges of his crippling condition, but also the abuse of his parents who were unable to deal with the hardships of raising a disabled child, and often took their frustration out on him. His mother would hit him and say things like  “You good for nothing, si geena (dead child in Hokkien), it is better you die,” to him, and his father pushed him to do difficult exercises every night, in an attempt to make him walk normally.

Read More »

Some people spend a fortune trying to keep themselves looking young, but one Polish social media star admits he only found success after making himself look at least 10 years older than he actually is. Meet Pawel Ladziak, aka “Polish Viking”.

Pawel often gets mentioned as one of the hottest-looking men over 40, and admits that some people who see his photos think that he’s around 60-years-old. And who can blame them? After all, he must be pretty old for his hair to have gone completely white, right? Well, Pawel Ladziak is only 35-years-old, and dyes his hair and beard white frequently in order to maintain this older look. And for good reason, as he credits this transformation for his social media success.

Read More »

Scientific evidence shows that when a person loses their sense of sight, the other four senses are enhanced, allowing them to be more aware of their surroundings even if they can’t see them. 17-year-old Jeet Trivedi is not blind, but he claims that he doesn’t need his eyes to perform tasks like driving, reading or even passing thread through a needle, after training his other senses to a superhuman level.

Jeet Trivedi is a controversial figure in India. There are those who see him as a real-life Daredevil, who can function as a normal human being without using his eyes, while others consider him and his mind training teacher, Bharat Patel, as frauds trying to make money by using deceitful tricks. To be honest, it’s hard to believe that someone could drive a gearless scooter for 40 km, on the world’s highest motorable road, while blindfolded, but Jeet allegedly did just that, in September of last year. How? Bharat Patel explains:

Read More »

Dr Sarojini Agarwal lost her daughter in a road accident, nearly 40 years ago, but the tragedy inspired her to help other abandoned girls. Since the mid 1980s, the 80-year-old woman has taken in around 800 girls, caring for them and ensuring that they receive a good education, in order to become confident and independent individuals.

Sarojini was driving a motorcycle on a road near her home in Lucknow, India, with her 8-year-old daughter, Manisha, on the back seat, when they became the victims of a hit and run accident. The mother survived, but her precious Manisha died that day. Dr Agarwal spent years morning her loss, and asking herself “why my child”, until one day when she realized that there were so many girls out there in need of motherly love, and helping them would be the best way to honor Manisha’s memory.

Read More »

Rubbing shoulders with celebrities, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers of social media, collecting more pairs of rare sneakers that he could ever wear or starting his own fashion labels are just some of the things Rashed Belhasa is famous for. And, at age 15, he’s just getting started.

The youngest son of Dubai business tycoon Saif Ahmed Belhasa, Rashed has pretty much everything you dreamed of having growing up, and a whole lot more. He’s more than willing to show off his glamorous life online, too, and the hundreds of thousands of people following him on sites like Instagram and YouTube are proof that most of us love nothing more than watch others flaunt their riches, dreaming of what their lives must be like. And this 15-year-old’s life is actually crazier than you could ever imagine.

Read More »

Elisabeth Anderson-Sierra, a 29-year-old mother-of-two from Beaverton, Oregon, suffers from a rare condition known as Hyperlactation Syndrome. She produces about 1.7 gallons of breast milk per day, almost 10 times as much as most lactating women, and spends around 10 hours every day nursing and pumping her milk. She has so far donated 600 gallons (2.5 tonnes) of breast milk to milk banks and families in need of it.

Ever since falling pregnant with her older daughter, Isabella, who is now two and a half years old, Elisabeth estimates that she has fed thousands of babies with her breast milk. She virtually spends her whole day pumping the liquid gold, which she then stores in four large freezers in her home, for local mothers who cannot breastfeed their newborns, gay couples and breast milk banks for premature babies. Despite the huge amount of time and the discomfort that goes into pumping the milk, the 29-year-old considers it a “labor of love”.

Read More »

Alberto Gutierrez Giron has been living alone in the mountains of Nicaragua for nearly 40 years, sculpting a 300-foot long cliff into a giant artwork, just like the one he saw in a dream, when he turned 9-years-old.

Popularly known as the “Hermit of Nicaragua”, “Stone Man” or “Sculptor of the Mountain”, Alberto Gutierez claims he was born on October 17, 1944 – although he doesn’t have a birth certificate anymore – in a village near Esteli City. He had always loved exploring the forests around his home, and at age 33, he decided he wanted to live his whole life surrounded by nature, creating an epic stone artwork he had dreamed of as a young boy. He had been thinking about it for years, but during the war that swept Nicaragua at the time, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get away from it all.

Read More »

Most commuters in Munich, Germany, spend hours stuck in traffic or trying to squeeze into one of the overcrowded subway trains, every morning, but for 40-year-old Benjamin David, commuting is actually a relaxing experience. Every day, he jumps into the Isar River and swims two kilometers to his workplace in Kulturstrand.

Benjamin David used to be one of the thousands of Münchners trying to make their way to work on busy roads and cycling paths, but two years ago he decided that he needed to find a simpler alternative and the Isar River seemed like the obvious answer. It flows right past his apartment in Baldeplatz, and, even though no one has been using it for traveling purposes in decades, it used to be the best ways to get around. People traveled up and down the Isar using rafts, and, at one point, it was one of the most popular routes between Rome and Vienna. But instead of paddling on a raft, Benjamin decided to swim to work instead, and that’s been his main commute for the past two years.

Read More »

At age 10, Caden Benjamin, from Mpumalanga, South Africa already tips the scales at a whopping 90 kg. He suffers from a rare genetic disorder known as Prader-Willi syndrome, which makes him feel hungry all the time.

Caden was always a hungry child, but his mother, Zola, realized that there was something unusual about his appetite at age 3, when he already weighed 40 kilograms. He took the boy to several doctors, but no one could explain why he was so hungry all the time and gaining so much weight. Finally, a doctor at Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Pretoria ran some tests and diagnosed Caden with Prader-Willi syndrome, an incurable condition that affects about 20 000 people worldwide.

Read More »

Solange Amorim, a 50-year-old mother from Manaus, Brazil has been getting a lot of online attention lately for her ability to transform herself into popular cartoon characters and her courage to regularly attend cosplay events, which usually appeal to youths.

Solange, who goes by Tia Sol on social media, discovered the wonderful world of cosplay when she started accompanying her daughter, Jessica, to local events. She fell in love with it immediately, but it wasn’t until a few years ago, when a friend asked her if she had the courage to dress up as a cartoon character herself that she really got involved in the cosplay community.

Read More »

Asian media is abuzz with talk and photos of a 50-year-old Singaporean photographer who doesn’t look a day over 30. His name is Chuando Tan and to say that he has aged well would be a gross understatement.

I can think of quite a few celebrities in their 50s who look very well for their age, but looking at these photos of Chuando Tan just makes you scratch your head and scroll up to the title of the article to make sure you read his age correctly. I was skeptical about his age after finding some photos of him on an obscure Chinese website, but several online sources have already confirmed that the man is actually in his 50s, including The Straits Times, which did an interview with him 2001.

Read More »

An unnamed man from Guilin, China, has melted the hearts of millions after it was reported that he has been dressing as a woman ever since his sister passed away, 20 years ago, in order to console his grieving mother.

A Pear video showing a man wearing a traditional cheongsam dress while looking after his mother, recently went viral, having been watched over 4 million times. He isn’t just any cross-dresser, in fact, he doesn’t even prefer women’s clothes, but he has been wearing them exclusively for two decades, in order to make his old mother happy. The woman had begun showing signs of mental illness following the death of her daughter, so one day he put on a woman’s dress, just to make her happy. She liked it so much that he kept doing it for 20 years.

Read More »

Egypt’s Al Nour Wal Amal orchestra is one of the world’s most remarkable musical ensembles. It consists of around 48 blind women from Cairo who have to rely solely on their memory when performing complicated compositions by classic composers like Mozart, Brahms, Strauss or Tchaikovsky.

Learning to play instruments like violin, chello or flute is a difficult process, but can you imagine mastering any of them without ever being able to see them? That’s what would-be members of the Al Nour Wal Amal orchestra have to do in order to become a part of the ensemble. And, once they’ve finally mastered their chosen instrument, they have to train their memory in order to be able to store up to 45 composition pieces in their heads, to be able to perform a concert, all while keeping in sync with the other members during a performance. It seems impossible, but these incredible women are living proof that it can be done.

Read More »

54-year-old Abdul Aziz has a very peculiar job. He has been working as a living statue for over thee decades, standing perfectly still for six hours a day and resisting people’s attempts to make him move, smile or pretty much flinch a muscle, anything that proves he is a living person. Nobody has ever been able to do it.

Aziz, fondly known as “India’s Statue Man”, has been performing his daily routine ever since 1985, soon after getting a job as a security guard at the VGP Golden Beach Resort in Chennai, India. His boss had recently traveled to the UK, where he was so impressed by the statue-like members of the Royal Guard outside Buckingham Palace that he wanted to do something similar back home. So he had his security guards undergo three months of training, where they would sit perfectly still for around four hours. They weren’t allowed to talk or smile, eat, drink, or even shoo away a fly if it sat on their faces. In the end, Abdul proved the best of the group, so he got the strange job.

Read More »

72-year-old Irmela Mensah-Schram is a special kind of cleaning lady. For the last 31 years, she has been travelling across Germany, cleaning its streets of hateful messages, be they propaganda posters or graffiti. She has received death threats from neo-nazis and the police have fined her numerous times, but she continues her fight against racism, antisemitism and xenophobia.

Armed with a small scraper and a can of spray-paint, Irmela Mensah-Schram, a.k.a. Germany’s “Hate Destroyer” has been removing or covering up Nazi propaganda and other right-wing slogans across her country for over three decades. For many, she is a hero fighting against hate, while some consider her actions to be in violation of freedom of speech, and even state officials have mixed feelings about her. She has received several awards for her long-term efforts to keep hateful propaganda off the streets, but she has also been fined and even taken to court for damaging others’ property.

Read More »