Headline: ‘Russian Shows Resolve’

It’s true, he did! Dmitry Bibikow of Harare, Zimbabwe, and originally of Voronezh, has been wheelchair-bound since a climbing accident, which is a problem because his apartment is on the fifth floor. The local council still hadn’t installed a promised elevator after six years, so he built a winch-looking apparatus on his balcony (his climbing expertise coming in handy), which can get him up and down the outside of the building on a rope. The Daily Mail has pictures .

It’s a perfectly fine human-interest story, but more interesting to me is the fact that a local man undertook to invent and then construct a rather complicated machine entirely on his own initiative, and the editors at the Zimbabwean thought their readers would be surprised to see so much “resolve” shown, not by a man who has lost use of half his limbs, but by a Russian.