Shout out to the Lefties this World Left-Handers Day!

In primary school, they were the weirdos, the ones who couldn’t write with their right hand. Teachers were hard on them. My uncle recollects that he was hit with the back of a blackboard duster anytime he held a pen with his left hand. Now, an ambidextrous engineer, he can write with both hands. Today is World Lefthanders Day and we celebrate the ones who are different, the left-handers. Obama, Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla, Ireland’s Prime Minister Brian Cowen, Uhuru Kenyatta and David Cameron.

“It doesn’t really affect my life, I rarely think of it,” says Josiah Kahiu, who manages a cafe in Westlands. “There was no shame in it at all. My mother, however, is also left handed and at school, she was made to sit at the left side of the class with her left hand tied to the window so that she could only use her right hand. Now she can write with both hands.”

“On a personal level, it never really came up, to be honest”, he says.

Issues that left handed students may face include smudging where the hand that holds the pen or pencil moves across the words after he or she writes them, blocking where the child can’t see everything that he or she has already written because the hand he or she continues to write with conceals part of the page, awkward direction: Whereas a right-handed child sweeps the pencil across the page from left to right, a left-handed child has to push it across and finally, cramped position: where the left-handed writer has to hold his or her arm closer to the body when writing than a right-handed person.

All in all, what is habit or nature sticks with many left handers living amongst us without any issues.

Interesting facts about left handed people

1. Lefties drink more than righties
2. Mothers over 40 are twice as likely to have a lefty baby.
3. Research shows lefties’ brains are more flexible, which gives lefties the upper hand in math.
4. Left-handedness runs in families. You are 50% more likely to be a southpaw if one of your parents is left handed.
5. Research has shown connections between the right and left sides of the brain are faster in left-handed people.
6. Men are more likely to be lefties, gay men even more likely.
7. Studies show lefties are more likely to have an IQ score above 131.
8. According to the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, the brains of left-handers process emotions differently and you can more easily piss off a lefty.
9. Dr. Alan Searleman found that lefties are more creative and also more forgetful.
10. Lefties are better at hearing. Left-handed people easily hear rapidly changing sounds.