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Outlook: From Cotton Picker to Brain Surgeon

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Dr Alfredo Quinones in scrubs

09/05/2017 GMT

From Cotton Picker to Brain Surgeon

BBC World Service - Outlook, From Cotton Picker to Brain Surgeon

From humble beginnings in Mexico Dr Quiñones-Hinojosa has become a leading brain surgeon.

As a young boy in Mexico Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa sold food to drivers to make money for his family. Today he's a leading US brain surgeon. Manuela Saragosa hears his story.

Dr Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa has had a most unusual career trajectory. Today he's chair of neurosurgery at the Mayo Clinic in Florida. He's a brain surgeon, finding a cure for cancer. Dr Quinones was born and grew up in Mexico and at the age of just 5, he was selling food to drivers to help make money for his family. But from an early age he had big dreams. 

In London, New York or any big city, it's not unusual to see homeless people, often accompanied by their dogs, and sometimes those dogs need help. Jade Statt is a vet originally from Scotland who wanted to lend a hand. She now lives and works in London and last year she started providing a free veterinary service to the dogs of homeless people she met on the streets of the city. Our reporter Milly Chowles went to meet her, down at the 'dog station' that she now works from.

They call it unresolved grief - the open-ended loss of mourning a missing person. Irina Krasovskaya knows it well. Five years after President Alexander Lukashenko came to power in Belarus in 1994 - Irina's husband, Anatoly Krasovskaya, disappeared, along with a prominent opposition politician. 
She hasn't seen her husband since. There has been a number of political disappearances in Belarus in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but Anatoly wasn't a politician - he was a successful businessman. And back then, he was living in the capital Minsk together with Irina and their young children..

He was born Nabin Waiba on a farm in Nepal's Nuwakot district, but today, three decades later, he is a she. Her name is Anjali Lama. In February she became the first transgender model to walk the runway at one of the biggest fashion weeks in Mumbai. She tells Manuela Saragosa her story. 

(Picture: Dr Alfredo Quinones. Credit: Mayo Clinic in Florida.)

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