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TIL Father Damien, a Catholic Priest, volunteered to help an island leper colony, saying “I make myself a leper to be with the lepers.” There he turned shacks into painted houses, cultivated farms, and started schools. Doing so he contracted leprosy himself. He was canonized a saint in 2009.

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BrEok TIL that over 1/4th of global hazelnut production is bought by an Italian company to make Nutella.
JY67B TIL German man Oskar Speck kayaked from Germany to Australia over the period 1932-1939. On his arrival in Australia, shortly after the start of WWII, Speck was interned as an enemy foreigner. He remained in prisoner-of-war camps for the duration of the war, but stayed in the country after the war
d8aMj TIL that Pad Thai, the national dish of Thailand, is actually not a traditional dish, but was invented, standardized and promoted by the Thai government, and imposed upon the people, as part of a broad cultural effort to establish a sense of national identity.
v1W8r TIL In 1802, Napoleon added a Polish legion to fight off the slave rebellion in Haiti. However, the Polish army joined the Haitian slaves in the fight for independence. Haiti's first head of state called Polish people "the White Negroes of Europe", which was then regarded as a great honour.
nexmr TIL the greatest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the wife of Feodor Vassilyev, a peasant from Shuya, Russia who gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.