[一] 遇到人生中的贵人时，要记得好好感激，因为他是你人生的转折点。
[二] 遇到可相信的朋友时，要好好和他相处，因为在人的一生中，能遇到的知已不多。[三] 遇到匆匆离开你人生的人时，要谢谢他走过你的人生，因为他是你精采回忆的一部分。
[四] 遇到曾经和你有误会的人时，要趁现在解清误会，因为你可能只有这一次机会解释清楚。[五] 遇到曾经恨过的人时，要微笑向他打招呼，因为他让你更加坚强。
[六] 遇到曾经背叛你的人时，跟他好好聊一聊，因为若不是他今天你不会懂这世界。[七] 遇到曾经爱过的人，记得微笑向他感激，因为他是让你更懂爱的人。
[八] 遇到曾经偷偷喜欢的人时，要祝他幸福唷！因为你喜欢他时，不是希望他幸福快乐吗。[九] 遇到你真的爱的人时，要努力争取和他相处下去，因为当他离去时，一切都来不及了。
[十] 遇到现在和相伴一生的人要百分百感谢他爱你，因为你们现在都得到幸福和真爱。From ST, Review
By Chua Mui Hoong
KV Stanly and ML Parashu were young rookie reporters in Mysore, India, when they met a prostitute who changed their lives.They were in a park for a photo shoot, for a story on the harsh life of the city's horse-cart workers. A lady standing under a tree derided them. 'You're wasting one day's earning by taking this picture,' she told the cart workers.
'These reporters put you in the newspaper so they get a byline. Tomorrow, they will move on to another story and you will still be struggling here.'
She challenged the reporters: 'Why don't you write my story?'
Disturbed by the encounter, they looked for her the next day to hear her story.
She took them to her 'home' - a strip of pavement where her son sat studying.
Mr Stanly wrinkles his nose as he tells me: 'She had been sold to a brothel by her husband. After a few years, the brothel also threw her out. She's stinky and drunk. Her clients are the lower class and poor labourers. All she wanted was to make sure her son has a decent life.'
For Mr Stanly and his friend Mr Parashu, that was a defining moment. They pooled funds to take the woman and her son off the streets into a spartan home.
Her next challenge for them: 'You are helping me but I am an old lady. What about all the other young girls in the brothels?'
Their consciences pricked, the two young men started Odanadi Seva Samsthe, a group that helps rescue girls from prostitution. They went on to build a shelter to house, school and train these women.
'I also trained in therapy, so I could do psychotherapy for the women and help them recover,' Mr Stanly told me over lunch.
He was one of 200 young leaders attending the Asia 21 Young Leaders' Summit held in Singapore over the weekend.
I asked if he ever got into trouble with criminal gangs that run the brothels and he nodded matter-of-factly. 'It's a fact of life. I've been hospitalised several times.'
Today, Odanadi, which means soulmate in the Kannada language, has rescued more than 400 girls from prostitution. It organises an advocacy group for prostitutes and has helped rehabilitate hundreds of women into mainstream jobs. A few were married in well-publicised ceremonies, helping to remove the stigma against girls forced into prostitution.
The organisation received a special award last Saturday from the New York-based Asia Society, which organised the summit.
As I spent the next two days among the participants, I would learn that stories like Mr Stanly's are common among this unusual lot of people, activists who did not stand by in the face of injustice, but rolled up their sleeves to change their respective corners of the world.
Mr Ravi Krishna, a lawyer trained in Pennsylvania, America, had a comfortable state counsel job in India. He often accompanied his frail mother to hospital and grew incensed at the way patients were dying en route to hospitals because there was no proper ambulance service.
He got together with friends to set up an ambulance service.
Called 1298 - Dial for Ambulance, the service uses technology to overcome the challenges of navigating the back lanes of Mumbai.
GPS (Global Positioning System) and RTS (Realtime Tracking System) track the location of 24 vehicles every moment of the day and night. Mr Krishna wants to use Google Earth maps to help in navigation - with ambulances sending back pictures of uncharted back lanes to widen Google Earth's future coverage.
To do so requires each ambulance to be fitted with a laptop computer. Problem: Traditional laptops which are fan-ventilated and run on hard discs are vulnerable to damage in Mumbai's treacherously bumpy, dusty environment.
Solution: Mr Krishna is talking with Taiwan company Via to use its fanless computers that do not run on hard discs.
As Mr Krishna told his story over dinner, Mr Faiysal AliKhan peppered him with questions.
Turns out Mr AliKhan, a logistics professional by day, runs a foundation devoted to rural development in Pakistan. 'We have the same problem about having no ambulance service and we're thinking of setting one up,' he said.
After dinner, the two caught up with each other and promised to get in touch. Despite the periodic tension between the two countries, development work knows no boundaries when activists like these are bound by a common zeal to improve the lives of those around them.
Many of those at the forum had incredible stories to tell - of how they moved beyond self, work and family to do something for others.
There was Filipino military commander Dennis Eclarin, who decided to build lives. He started a microfinance foundation to reach the highland and most remote parts of the Philippines.
Then there was Mr Mitchell Pham, who fled Vietnam in a rickety boat when he was 13, with 65 others or so. The boat ran out of food, then water and fuel.
A cruise liner passed them by - with clueless tourists waving and taking pictures of the refugees in their dire straits. The next ship was an oil tanker, whose captain rescued the refugees.
'That was my leadership moment,' said Mr Pham. 'I learnt that even if you are in business, carrying on with your life, you can choose to ignore others' call or you can choose to make a difference and help. The cruise captain chose one, the oil tanker captain chose another.'
Mr Pham stayed at an Indonesian refugee camp for 1 1/2 years before settling in New Zealand, where he now runs an IT company and is active in business and community organisations, having chosen not to ignore others' problems.
Closer to home, there was Ms Eileena Lee, who started an online support group nine years ago for gay and lesbian people in Singapore. She now runs Pelangi Pride Centre, a resource centre on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues.
'I never saw myself as a leader. But I suffered in my own journey when I came out as a lesbian woman, and if I can do something to help others on that journey, I felt I had to.'
As a panellist at a discussion put it, it is about starting small, and making one plus one equal not two, but 11.
Listening to stories of these activists' 'leadership moments', learning what spurred them to act, I was humbled into silence.
I am a columnist but for once I have no point of view to offer, nothing but these stories from those who make a difference.
From Slashdot comments
by quokkapox
You make new friends every day!
Haha, "New friends every day." Get it?! LOL.
It's not so funny when it happens to you or your family. Wait until someone you know gets it. You won't be laughing anymore.
Haha, that guy has a limp. Haha, that woman is blind. Haha, that kid is retarded. Hahaha. Fucking hilarious.
Whatever you do, don't get Alzheimer's disease. It sucks.
My grandmother just turned 94 and has advanced Alzheimer's disease. She can barely walk anymore. I devote a few hours of my life every single day to caregiving. If you've never known someone like this, you really have no idea what's involved. Yeah, we could put her in a home. We could watch her die sooner that way, wearing diapers and ceaselessly, hopelessly calling out for someone to please take her home. As it is now, she wears diapers, but at least we always change them. In nursing homes, they don't.
Have you ever had someone you know and love, who helped raise you and even changed *your* diapers and then helped teach you how to count and how to read and how to do puzzles and math and typing and how to play games, who taught you the names of the plants that grow out in the back yard? And now she can smile and say "Hello", and tell you to get the hell out because she don't know who you are a moment later?
That's Alzheimer's. You can be helping to manage her most intimate financial affairs completely honestly, you can be doing her laundry and getting her medicine and bringing her groceries and cooking her meals and washing her dishes and vacuuming her floors and helping her get to the doctor and even wiping her ass, when she cannot do it herself anymore, and yet she'll still tell you she loves you one night, and the next morning she wants you to go away, go to hell, or just please, please take her home. Because she doesn't know what home means anymore. She's already at home, and she doesn't know who you are anymore.
She knows what she knew in 1920 or 1930 sometimes, funny stories she can still tell sometimes, but she mixes up everyone's names; she doesn't know who is who anymore. She used to speak three languages, English, German, and French. But now she often speaks gibberish, a weird combination of whatever words she still can recall. She can't always understand simple sentences. She's like a kid who cannot learn.
Alzheimer's sucks; nursing homes suck. Go visit one someday if you doubt me. My grandmother's genes and her circumstances allowed her to outlive two of her children. She never got cancer, but that's what killed her elder son at 50. She had a heart attack thirty years ago, but she didn't die of heart disease. That's what killed her elder daughter at 60. Yet my grandmother lives on, as her mind slowly disintegrates.
She still likes to watch children playing, or to meet a drooling baby, maybe a child of someone who helps care for her, brought over to visit. She still likes to pet her cats and smile and watch them roll on the floor with catnip at her feet, she still can interface with her two grandchildren, she still has a sense of humor that we all can understand and sometimes laugh about together.
She doesn't know what year it is or what day it is, and sometimes she can't remember how to properly hold a spoon (or she'll try drinking from it like a straw). But she especially likes bananas and squash and sweet potatoes and chocolate chip cookies. I know this because I'm there sometimes to remind her to take another bite. She says "This is good, thank you!"
And sometimes when you help lift her into bed at night, she'll tell you she loves you. I guess that helps make it all worthwhile.
Anyway, this is what will happen to you if you don't die of anything else or get hit by a bus before your brain starts to degrade. I suppose it hasn't been all bad, I have learned a lot caring for my grandmother. But she is no longer able to offer her opinion.