On October 1, we celebrate Children’s Day in Sri Lanka. This week, the Funday Times would like to invite you to meet some remarkable kids. Some were smart and talented, others were brave and determined – and they all made a difference in their time.

Arfa Karim Randhawa was born in Pakistan, in the village of Faisalabad in 1995. Arfa was one of the cleverest children in her school but everyone was still surprised when she became the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCPs) in the World in 2004 – Arfa was only 9 years old.

Bill Gates invited her to visit the Microsoft Headquarters in the USA and back home Arfa was showered with awards, including the Fatima Jinnah Gold Medal, the Salam Pakistan Youth Award and the President’s Award for Pride of Performance.

Both as a child and a girl, Arfa had to overcome great odds to be as successful as she was. She told interviewers that her philosophy was simple: “If you want to do something big in your life, you must remember that shyness is only in the mind,” she said. “If you think shy, you act shy. If you think confident you act confident. Therefore never let shyness conquer your mind.”

When Arfa fell ill and passed away in 2011, her country grieved for her. A park in Lahore has been named  ‘Arfa Software Technology Park’.

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Annelies Marie Frank was only 15 years old when she died but the diary she left behind her has introduced her to millions of people.

When the Nazis occupied Holland, thirteen-year-old Anne and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding, afraid that like so many other Jews at the time, they were targets.

Her journal was found in the attic where she spent the last years of her life. Hiding from the Gestapo, the Nazi’s secret police, the family remained in a secret annex of an old office building.

Unable to leave, they had to cope not only with hunger and boredom, but the constant threat of discovery and death.

When their whereabouts were discovered, they were sent to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, where Anne died in 1945.

When her diary was found and published after her death, Anne became famous. Her book remains a testament to the horrors of war and the terrible losses of the Holocaust.

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Louis Braille became blind when he was just 3 years old. A smart, young boy, he found he could no longer sit with his old class. So he was pleased to get a scholarship to study at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, when he was 10 years old. But even there, all the blind students had in the way of reading material were 14 huge books with raised letters.

Then in 1821, he met a former soldier named Charles Barbier who had invented ‘night writing,’ — a code of 12 raised dots that let soldiers share top-secret information on the battlefield without speaking.

Louis immediately saw the potential in Barbier’s work — he whittled 12 dots down to 6 and perfected the system by the time he was 15. In 1837, he added symbols for Math and Music. Braille took a while to catch on, but now it’s used all over the world.

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