Happenings

During my stay in Britain I have discovered, as I have mentioned previously, that people tend to speak to each other no matter where they are. Which is really nice sometimes. I have had some interesting talks during my journey's from destination A to B. I want to talk about two of them.

Firstly. About a week ago when me and Gaye came home from Bristol one guy started talking to us in the bus. He had a crutch with him so we asked what had happened to him. Then he told us a long story on how he had had a motorcycle accident 4 years ago and has had around 8 operations so far. He told his accident wasn't caused by him and he's actually very lucky to have survived. The doctors had told that maybe they had to amputate his leg but then the leg was basically built up from different tissues from the guy's body. And the guy told he still had one operation to go. He showed us pictures from his iPhone about his leg after the operation. The pictures were quite disgusting and ugly. I mean- they were from a leg that had swollen up to the size of three legs and had infection in it. I'm glad we hadn't eaten much before....

Secondly. On my train trip from Leeds to Bristol a guy sat next to me in Birmingham. I was listening to my music calmly and suddenly the man tapped on my shoulder. I had a book "The reality of Dyslexia" that I was reading on the table in front of me and the man had read the title of the book. He asked if he could have a closer look at the book because he has a son who has severe dyslexia. Then the guy told that his son is finishing university master's degree in maths. And that he hasn't told his son that he has dyslexia. He also told that his son can't tell the days of the week or exact times. The man also talked about his other son who has severe autism and lives in a care home. We discussed a lot about working with disabilities, the topics were mostly about dyslexia and autism and british health care system. It was a nice talk. By the time the man went down in Bristol Parkway he had written down the name of the book and had understood that he should tell his son he's dyslexic. My day had filled it's purpose. Hopefully I helped to make someone's life better. I mean- having no idea that you have dyslexia and not knowing the reason why you struggle so much with reading and have struggled the whole life- it must be hard. And when you know that you have the disability, you can actually tell people this, and they will accept it and won't look at you as if you were some kind of a freak or stupid person. I guess on that day went well and I had a tiny part in changing someone's life towards better.

I hope I will have lots of this kind of happenings during my journeys around Britain. I like them. Meeting interesting people is fun. And educative.