Inspirational stories

Eversince I have been here, I have been watching Oprah every afternoon during the weekdays and many people see this show only for housewives...They would relate Oprah with soap operas here... Many a times during my conversations with Americans..they would all ask me what I do in the apartment. I would tell them that I watch Oprah and the next thing they would say is, "And soap operas?" I guess there is some relation between Oprah show, soap operas and women. Hmm...go figure out.

Last week, Oprah invited Jay Leno in her show and interviewed him with his favourite child prodigies. There are kids about age 6 with photogenic memory, who plays piano well etc.. Lastly, she interviewed this African-American girl who inspired me.


This is her story...

Four years ago, Adanech was living in a hut in Ethiopia with her ailing grandmother. One day, on the way to the market, Adanech was struck by a train. Her right arm was severed, and her right leg was crushed and amputated. Adanech's grandmother was too sick to care for her. That's when Yonus, an aide worker, came to the rescue.

Yonus brought Adanech to Atlanta where she was treated for her injuries and fitted with a prosthetic leg. The Spratlins, friends of Yonus', agreed to take care of the 7-year-old while she was in America. Three months after meeting this special little girl, the Spratlin family fell in love and decided to adopt Adanech with her grandmother's blessing.

Since moving to Georgia with her new family, Adanech has adjusted remarkably well. She has tried out for the school play, won a student council election and swims competitively.

Isnt that amazing?? They showed her swimming butterfly and freestyle in her swimming competitions. She said that she saw her brothers swimming in their house pool and she grew bored watching them swim. So, she decided to join them and teach herself how to swim.

After watching this episode on child prodigies and learning of this inspirational story, I realised that if you are determined to do something, you will def attain your goal. I read that child prodigies have a passion for one thing. For e.g if they have a love for music, they would spend hours and hours practising in front of the piano and so therefore, it is not surprising how they can be so good at it..because they are passionate about something. Of course, they are gifted..but I am sure if a regular person spends the same number of hours, they can be good at it too.

So, just like the story above...this girl was determined to do things that any normal person can do..She excels even better than a normal kid in school by being in school council and swimming competitively without an arm and leg.

Today's Oprah show touched me as well when she interviewed phenomenal females. One particular woman inspired me...Her name is Sabriye, from Germany. At the age of 12, degenerative eye disease took away her sight.

Eventually, Sabriye went to a school for the blind and learned self-reliance. She went on to college where she studied the complex language of Tibet. At the time, Tibetan had never been translated into braille—but that didn't stop Sabriye. She created her own Tibetan-German/German-Tibetan braille dictionary, the first of its kind. Her past struggles with blindness sparked an idea that would take Sabriye to the other side of the world.

She established the first school for the blind in Tibet in order to give blind children confidence and freedom from shame—a grim challenge in a place with a deep prejudice against the blind. While traveling through Tibet on horseback, Sabriye encountered blind children hidden away in dark rooms and exiled from their own families—one boy had spent his life tied to his bed.

Sabriye and her boyfriend Paul opened "Braille Without Borders" in order to help children around the world stand up in society and say, 'Hey, I'm blind. So what?'" Thanks to her school in Tibet, blind children who were once outcasts can now read, write, use computers and speak in three languages—giving them the skills to be the main breadwinners in their families!

There was this particular sentence that she said, spoke to me...hope this encourages you.

"People very often see only the reasons why things are not possible," Sabriye says. "They never think of the one reason why it IS possible. … A lot of people, they see problems.

Then she jokingly said, "This is a good thing about being blind: You don't see the obstacles!"