Oddity: Physically Challenged Man Spends 3 Years Carving Road Through Hill | The Precision

63-year-old Melethuveettil Sasi has never even heard the story of Dashrath Manjhi, the famous Mountain Man of Bihar,
who spent two decades carving a road through a mountain with just
chisels and hammers, but he managed a very similar feat. Sasi, who can
barely walk and move his right hand, spent three years of his life
digging a 200-meter dirt road through a hill in front of his house, so
he could finally support his family again.

 

Sasi
used to work as a coconut tree climber. He had been doing it since he
was 15-years-old, but one day, 18 years ago, something went wrong during
a routine climb and he fell to the ground from high up. The right side
of his body was paralyzed, and months went by before he was able to move
his limbs again. His sons had to quit school in order to work and
support the family, while their father was confined to a bed.

“I was good at climbing trees, but that day, somehow I slipped. One
side of my body was paralyzed. My legs and hands were broken. I spent
days and months in bed, not even able to move,” Sasi recently told The News Minute. “It took years for me to even be able to stand up. But I wanted to walk somehow. So I slowly taught myself to walk.”

 

After
years of treatments and physiotherapy, Melethuveettil Sasi was able to
walk again and regain some control over his right hand. He was still a
disabled person, though, and would never climb a coconut tree again. But
he still wanted to put food on his family’s table, so he one day came
up with the idea of buying a three-wheeled scooter that he could ride to
the nearby city of Thiruvananthapuram to sell lottery tickets. All he
needed was some financial support from the local authorities.

He applied to the the Panchayat – local government – for some money to
buy a scooter, but they just laughed in his face, asking him if he
planned to fly it over the dirt hill in front of his home. Thinking that
the problem was solvable, Sasi spent ten years writing petitions and
knocking on doors, begging authorities to build a road to his house. 

No
one helped him. In 2013, after getting sick of rejections, Sasi decided
to literally take things into his own hands and dig the road himself.
He could only rely on simple tools like shovels and pickaxes, and his
physical disability was going to make things infinitely more difficult,
but he was determined to prove to himself and everyone else that it
could be done.

“I never thought about when I would finish the work. I was just determined to have a road. Every day, I would begin my work at 5am, then stop at around 8.30am when the day began to get hot, and resume the work at around 3.30pm or 4pm in the evening and work till the sun went down,” the man recalled.

Despite his determination, Sasi ran into trouble soon after he started
work. His semi-paralyzed limbs just weren’t up for hard labour, and he
found it difficult to maintain his balance while digging. “Initially, I
got injured many times. I couldn’t balance well when I swung the pickax,
and fell often. But eventually I managed to tame my body,” he proudly
told The News Minute.

As
word got out about what Melethuveettil Sasi was attempting to do, the
locals started coming by just to laugh at him and tell him he was crazy,
but he just kept on digging. As time passed and he made significant
progress, some of his neighbors realized that he might just be able to
pull it off, and instead of taunts, they started offering words of
encouragement.

It
took three long years of working an average of six hours a day for Sasi
to dig through the whole hill, but it didn’t mean the end of his
struggle. 

After
vanquishing the tall hill, he had to face another difficult foe – an
electricity pole that had to be moved a few feet in order to clear the
way for his dirt road. But he needd the help of local authorities for
that, and they hadn’t proven eager to help in the past (The News Minute).

Source: The Precision