Twenty years ago, I was a school bus driver. Charlie, who was eight years old, became a rider. All the students had stories to tell me but Charlie ignored me.

From that day on, Charlie was a trial. If a fight broke out I didn’t have to turn my head to know who had started it. If a girl was crying, the chances were Charlie had pulled her hair. No matter how I spoke to him, he wouldn’t say a word. He’d just stare at me with his eyes.

Toward the end of that year, the kids on my bus gave me a small medal with the words “To the Best Bus Driver Ever ”. I put it up on the dashboard (仪表盘).

One day, when I got on the bus I realized that the medal was gone. One boy said, “Charlie was the first one on the bus. I bet he took it.” Other children also said, “Yeah! Charlie did it!” I asked Charlie, “Have you seen the medal?” “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said. All the children shouted, “Check his pockets.” I asked Charlie to come forward. I stuck my hand into one of his pockets. I felt it. Charlie stared at me for a long time. I was about to pull the medal out of Charlie’s pocket when I stopped myself. “It must have fallen off before I got here,” I said to the kids. Without a word, Charlie returned to his seat. That summer Charlie moved away.

Some years later, when I was in a department store, someone called my name. It was Charlie. To my surprise, he hugged me. He pulled an old key chain which was actually the medal from his pocket and gave it to me. “You were the only one who didn’t give up on me. Thank you! You are so beautiful!” he said.

Marijana grew up in Serbia. Her parents made a living by picking vegetables and selling them on the market. Neither one of them ever got past primary school. “We were poor," Marijana says.

The Roma are Europe's largest minority (少数)group, numbering 8 to 12 million. They often face discrimination and have trouble getting basic rights and services. Many Roma families go hungry now and then. Roma children are often put into “special schools” for children with special educational needs. Without education, people can't find jobs, and they're poor for generations.

For Marijana and many other young Roma, both the chance for success and the pain of discrimination began in primary school. “It made me feel so bad," she says,"when my classmates' parents didn't want their children to sit with me." Sometimes she had to deal with teachers who picked on her simply because she was Roma. Once, she did an art project for a class.“But the teacher said, ‘You didn't do it, someone else did. You are Roma; it is in your   character to lie,’ Marijana says.

But it was not all discrimination. “I had a very nice teacher of geography, ”Marijana says. “Because of the trust some teachers gave me, I felt I needed to keep going and succeed.”

Marijana is glad she went to mainstream schools, where the quality of education was better, but what really got her through school was that her parents believed in her. “Some people often said to my parents, ‘She'll get married. Why are you wasting your money and time on her?’ Nobody except my family believed I could do it,” she says.

Since university in Belgrade, Marijana has been working for the World Bank for 7 years. She deals with both Roma and non-Roma problems including education and social protection. But her most important impact might just come from her own history. “When I do field visits as part of my work, I always tell my own story to encourage Roma kids and their parents to go to school, and not to give up.”

Cimabue, the greatest painter of the Middle Ages in Italy, was surprised one day after his lunch break to discover that a fly had seated itself under the nose of a character that he had been working on. He swatted the fly, but it didn’t move. He reached out to touch the insect, only to find it was only wet paint. Turning around, he saw that his apprentice (学徒), Giotto, was laughing. Giotto had painted the fly when Cimabue was away, and it looked so real that Cimabue had been completely fooled.

Giotto di Bondone was born into a poor family in a village. Legend has it that one day, when Cimabue was wandering around the countryside, he spotted a young shepherd boy drawing pictures of his sheep, which were so vivid that Cimabue immediately asked him to come to Florence and learn how to paint. That was how Giotto’s story began in Florence, where the young student grew under Cimabue’s instruction and soon surpassed his master in skill.

At that time, people in paintings didn’t look real, and the symbolism of art was difficult for viewers to connect with. Innovation was not stressed, so art had remained the same for hundreds of years.

However, Giotto thought art should be something more, connected with people in a more realistic way. His masterpieces included the forty major frescoes for the Arena Chapel. Adopting many techniques that were uncommon then, he painted people the way he saw them, instead of the overly tall and beautiful people that other artists painted. He created three-dimensional space by using perspective, something that had not been done since Roman times.

In addition to painting, Giotto wrote poetry and drew architectural plans. When Giotto was in his sixties, he painted the Ognissanti Madonna, another famous work of art. He continued working until the age of seventy. The ideas Giotto brought to painting throughout his life revolutionized the art world and made him one of the greatest painters ever.