For the past 10 years, 84-year-old Chen Te-hsun (陳德訓) has quietly been helping maintain the roads around Siaoliouciou Township (小琉球) by repairing potholes while the town sleeps. His work has gone largely unnoticed until a local resident posted his story on the Internet.
The poster, surnamed Tsai (蔡), wrote that when he wakes up at 6am, he often sees Chen already hard at work plugging holes in the road with cement.
Tsai wrote that Chen has been spending his own money buying cement and asphalt to fill the roads around the township.
At the end of his post, Tsai asked where the township mayor and councilors are when needed.
Chen said he retired as a fisherman at the age of 50 and started his own business.
After seeing his relatives and friends suffer injuries and scrapes because of potholes, Chen said he asked the deities for their blessing to keep the roads around town smooth. He has not stopped working since he received their blessing a decade ago.
Chen’s family said that the deities had taken into consideration his age and told him that he should only repair roads in winter and avoid working in the summer heat.
Chen said he learned about paving techniques used by different countries from TV programs.
He spreads a coat of cement powder on the paved asphalt and sprinkles it with water, which he said makes roads more durable.
While a bag of cement cost between NT$200 and NT$300 when he started, the price has since dropped, Chen said, adding that most stores knew what he was buying the cement for and gave him discounts.
Chen said he does not think he is doing anything special and the work helps him exercise and stay healthy.
Hundreds of people shared Tsai’s post about Chen, with some netizens saying they were moved by Chen’s actions, while others said the government needed to pay more attention to fixing the township’s roads.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching