Nitsa Michael, owner of the Seaward Hotel in Weston-super-Mare, England has stopped taking guests at the the height of their busy season. Instead, she has taken in 22 Ukrainians seeking refuge from the war. Her family fled from Cyprus to Britain following a Turkish invasion in 1974, and she wanted to do something to help people in the same ‘horror situation’, fleeing from Russian aggression in Ukraine this year.
The 84 year old widow and great-grandmother of five said she felt for them and wanted to help in a big way. At her mother’s request, her daughter Michelle Michael, who is in charge of running the hotel, registered their family’s hotel on the Homes For Ukraine webpage. Before they knew it, they were welcoming their first refugee.
The hotel has room for 70 refugees and their door is still open. Michelle said “The 22 arrivals share meals and time together, and basically they heal together. Mum always has and still does listen to the news every day and it was really bothering her. She was feeling quite sad about it all, and that’s when she came up with the idea of opening the hotel to refugees. Seeing all the people staying here and how happy they are now, it’s all due to her.”
Decades earlier, Nitsa worked as a seamstress in London and her husband Axentis was a chef before they eventually moved to the South West where they took over the Seaward Hotel. They made it their family home where they raised their four children. Nitsa said seeing the refugees fleeing reminded her of the anxiety back in ‘74 when Turkey invaded. “We had no way of knowing if my father’s family were dead or alive because there was no connectivity. Everyone fled their homes with nothing to their names.”
Michelle said Nitsa visits the hotel once a week and makes sure to meet every guest and listen to their stories. She loves to see the children around in the hotel as it reminds her of raising her own four children there. She said it really has brought the hotel back to life.
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A video of Good Samaritans in Florida rushing to help a driver experiencing a medical emergency in her car went viral. The rescue happened on May 5th and the video shows several people springing into action after witnessing a gray car slowly roll into an intersection with its driver, Laurie Rabyor, unconscious at the steering wheel.
A press conference was held where Florida’s Boynton Beach Police Department recognized Jannette Rivera, Juan Chavez Jr., Michael Edelstein, David Formica, DaVida Peele, Marko Bartolone, Muriel Vaughns and Robin Fox for their quick thinking and courage. The press conference was the culmination of tracking down those who had helped. Each person was awarded a Royal Caribbean cruise and a $2,000 gift card, plus flowers.
Jannette Rivera, a co-worker of Rabyor’s had seen Rabyor slumped over her steering wheel, jumped into the street and began waving her arms to attract the attention of other motorists.
Several individuals, including Edelstein, leaped into action to find a way to stop the car, put it into park and then push it into a nearby 7-Eleven parking lot. A nurse there helped Rabyor until the fire department arrived.
Marko Bartolone said “I saw a lady chasing a car through an intersection in South Florida … and I thought, ‘Wow, she’s really mad at that other lady!. I figured out what was happening and thought, ‘I really can’t stop a car.’ But then I see Chavez … and I thought, well, with a couple of people, we could probably stop the car. I feel like I just did what anyone would do.” Michael Edelstein said “I’m stunned to be standing here. I was in the right place at the right time. … I was the fool that jumped in front of the car and then tried to punch the window out.”
Rabynor says she doesn’t remember any of it. “They all just came together to help a little old lady and I appreciate it so, so much. … It is so wonderful to see something nice today instead of all this crap that’s going on in the world and even in our community. … It’s so nice to see something nice” she said.
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Tongai Matandirotya, a bartender turned hero, who works at Brass Bell Restaurant near Cape Town South Africa left behind any thoughts of his own safety to dive into the cold Atlantic ocean to rescue a mother and daughter swept off the pier by a rogue wave. It was a relatively calm day and several people were walking by the window of Brass Bells looking out to the water when a huge wave came over the harbor and pulled them into the ocean.
Clair Gardiner and her 8-year-old daughter Arya van Hilten were two of the people swept away. Gardiner knew they were being pulled into the water as soon as the wave rushed over them, and she managed to wrap her arms around little Arya. Matandirotya saw it happen and dropped the drink he was pouring, ran outside and dove into the cold Atlantic Ocean.
The ferocity of the waves had pulled Gardiner and Arya apart. Matandirotya used his belt to rescue Arya who wasn’t able to stay afloat by herself. Gardiner said she went back to the restaurant to thank him “I didn’t know who saved us but my daughter recognized him immediately, and we all embraced each other. We are so thankful to Tongai and the tourist man who risked their lives to save ours; we’ll forever be grateful to them.”
Matandirotya, along with another man, also saved Angela Campbell, 75, who was also swept away that day while taking a stroll with her family. “I looked around and realized I was in the water. I panicked! Eventually, I managed to turn over, but I then started sinking. I remember talking to myself, saying ‘God make it quick, I’m scared’. Campbell said that besides her life being saved, she was more thankful that her grandson was not in the buggy that she was pushing when the wave hit her.
Matandirotya told news outlets he dove in because he saw a child (Aryna) go in and he has a very soft spot for kids and his instinct to help just kicked in. Brass Bell restaurant spokesperson Ethan Govender said the staff and management team were impressed by Matandirotya’s bravery. “We applaud him for his braveness in jumping into action to save those that fell into the ocean. Tongai is a wonderful, loveable, fun human being. His character speaks volumes, and we are immensely proud of the risk he took in saving lives.”
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A college football player and NFL prospect’s touching act of kindness to a homeless pregnant woman has gone viral. Malik Willis, 22, a senior at Liberty University and a quarterback for the Liberty Flames, was in Indianapolis, Indiana for the 2022 NFL scouting combine when his deed was caught on video by a passerby.
Willis had just left a Nike event where the sportswear brand gifted him a suitcase full of new clothes when he saw a homeless woman and her son sitting on the sidewalk. He stopped and gave her some new shirts — completely unaware that an admirer was capturing the moment on camera from across the street.
The video was shared on Twitter by user Ryan Lacey, who recorded it while Willis’ kind act was already in progress. Willis was spotted on the sidewalk of Indianapolis talking to a person who was sitting on a milk crate and asking passers by for money. The Liberty QB opened his suitcase to hand over clothes to help. The video quickly went viral, and in just a day, it had been viewed over 3.1 million times on Twitter and shared with many commenters praising him for being a good person even when no one is looking.
Willis quickly became the darling of the 2022 NFL scouting combine and was asked about the act later that day on an NFL Network broadcast. ‘I walked past her on the way to the Nike suite and I chopped it up with them and I walked out with a suitcase and whatnot and I felt bad because I saw her son. It was a pregnant lady and she was homeless. And I was just like, “Shoot, I don’t have money, but I can give you a couple of shirts. I just felt like I had to do that. I mean, I’m at a position right now where I’m not worried about much of anything except getting better. So, if I can help her out in any way, I felt like I had to” Willis said.
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Last year, “Humans of Bombay” shared a story about an auto rickshaw driver who sold his house to pay for granddaughter’s education. In his interview with Humans of Bombay (HOB), Desraj Ji, 74, revealed that after losing both of his sons, it was the responsibility of providing for his grandchildren and daughters-in-law that gave him the strength to keep going.
Six years ago, his oldest son left for work as usual but never returned. His body was found a week later. Two years later, he lost his other son to suicide. When his granddaughter asked if she would have to quit school, Desraj assured her that she would be able to continue her education. He started working longer hours, leaving home at 6 a.m., driving his auto rickshaw until midnight.
But when his granddaughter said that she wanted to travel to Delhi for a B.Ed course, Desraj knew he wouldn’t be able to afford it on his current income. “But I had to fulfill her dreams… at any cost. So, I sold our house and paid her fee,” he said. His wife, daughter-in-law and grandkids stayed with a relative in their village while Desraj stayed in Mumbai to work and slept in his car.
It was a sacrifice he was happy to make for his granddaughter’s future. “I can’t wait for her to become a teacher, so that I can hug her and say, ‘You’ve made me so proud.’ She’s going to be the first graduate in our family,” he said. The story of Mr Desraj’s selfless deed touched thousands of hearts after it was shared online. Offers of help poured in and his story was also posted on Twitter by the Congress’s Archana Dalmia with an appeal to Mumbai residents to help the auto driver.
A Facebook user named Gunjan Ratti started a fundraiser for Mr Desraj, which exceeded its goal, raising a total of 24 Lahk ($32,000 USD) for him. Thanks to the love and support of internet strangers, the grieving elderly father has a roof over his head and can pay for his granddaughter’s education. The Humans of Bombay page shared a video of Mr Desraj receiving his cheque and thanking his supporters for the love they showered on him.
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When an Instacart shopper decided to go with her gut she may have saved a couple lives in the process. Jessica Higgs, a mom from Georgia, opened up about how she listened to her intuition during a recent food delivery. In a viral TikTok that has garnered over 16.5 million views since being posted on Feb. 1, Higgs talked about the incident.
It started as a normal delivery, ordered by a woman in Atlanta for her dad in Crandall, Georgia. The customer instructed Higgs to leave the bags on his porch. “I got there and something was telling me, ‘You’ve got to help this man out,’” she recalls in the video. “You’re not supposed to go inside someone’s house, but I used my judgment and I brought the groceries inside.”
That’s when Higgs noticed the man was not well. “I could not leave. He just was stumbling all over the place, and there was something different about that,” Higgs said. Higgs said there was a potent smell inside and she noticed a propane tank. She messaged the customer’s daughter to let her know that he “looked sick.” She also mentioned that there was a propane tank in the home and there might be a gas leak since she felt dizzy while inside.
The woman responded that she would have her son stop by to check it out. After the leak was confirmed, the customer credited Higgs with saving her dad’s life, left a five-star review and increased her tip from $14 to $100. In the video, Higgs breaks down while recounting what happened next. “I’m crying because of what she commented this morning,” she says. “‘Thank you so much. Once my son went to check on my dad it turned out it was definitely was leaking, you definitely saved my dad and my younger son’s life!!!”
In the video Higgs says through tears “I’m just an Instacart worker but if you see something, say something. I’m so happy I did.” Hundreds of thousands of people have commented on Higgs’ video praising her for her actions. Instacart also issued a statement praising Higgs’ actions.
“We are constantly inspired by the incredible people who choose to be Instacart shoppers and intentionally make a positive impact in the lives of others. This story touched our hearts and we are grateful for shoppers like Jessica.”
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A former college roommate is donating liver to his friend he hadn’t seen in 21 years. Steven Robinson, 57, was on a family road trip to Detroit when he realized his old friend, Richard Koonce, lived in Ohio. Robinson called Koonce as they were passing through. Koonce, 62, invited Robinson and his family over for an unplanned visit. When the family arrived, Robinson was taken back by Koonce’s considerable weight loss.
Koonce has been battling a rare liver disease called primary sclerosing cholangitis, or PSC, since 2019. PSC is a potentially life-threatening, incurable, and rare, yet chronic liver disease that the American Liver Foundation says causes scarring in a person’s bile ducts, leading to infections, tumors, and severe liver failure.
Koonce had tried various treatment options with little success, and was seeking a living donor for a liver transplant. Since the liver is the only organ in the human body that can grow cells and regenerate itself, donors can give part of their liver to people who need them and regrow their own. Robinson did not hesitate, offering to donate a piece of his liver to save his friend. Robinson was a match with the same blood type.
The chance encounter between the pair of former HBCU college roommates last summer set the stage for the life-saving operation that was performed on Valentine’s Day at a Cleveland hospital. Robinson will be in recovery for six to eight weeks and Koonce’s recovery will take about six months. Robinson said “I think it was a spiritual thing, I always had love for the brother and I could see something was wrong. I could see it in his eyes.”
The unlikely story highlights the dire need for more Black organ donors in the United States, where Black people make up the largest share of minorities in need of organ transplants, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health report. Nearly 84% of organs received from Black people in 2020 were from donors who had died, according to study, but only about 16% of Black organ donations that year came from living donors.
Prior to his college roommate’s decision, Koonce had only shared news of his condition with a small group of friends. “I couldn’t ask any of them to do this,” he said. “But if it’s something you want to do, I can give you the information. That was my position. “I am so truly grateful for the gift of life that God has offered through my friend, Steve Robinson, who decided almost within the very minute that he learned of my disease to step up and do whatever he could to help me,” Koonce said.
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Fans do all kinds of strange things at sporting events but one exchange ended up being life saving for Vancouver Canucks assistant equipment manager Brian Hamilton. He said a fan, Nadia Popovici, pressed her cell phone against the glass separating fans from players. The message on the screen read “The mole on the back of your neck is possibly cancerous. Please go see a doctor!”
Hamilton said it was a strange thing to read at a game but he decided to have it checked out. As it turns out, Hamilton had the mole removed which was subsequently confirmed to be a melanoma tumor. At a press conference Hamilton said “She saved my life. The words out of the doctor’s mouth were if I ignored that for four to five years I wouldn’t be here. How she saw it boggles my mind. It wasn’t very big, I wear a jacket, I wear a radio on the back of my jacket. She’s a hero.”
The team wanted to reach out to Popovici somehow to thank her so they set up a social media campaign to reunite the two before the Canucks played Seattle Kraken on January 1st. As a way of saying thank you, during the second commercial break it was revealed for everyone in the Seattle Climate Fund Arena that both teams had raised $10,000 for Popovici toward medical school.
Nadia Popovici said she was just following her medical training when she noticed that the dark spot on the back of Hamilton’s neck was discolored, raised, and had irregular borders: all potential signs of the skin cancer melanoma. Popovici’s diagnosis of the melanoma was a method of identification called the “ABCDE Rule, an acronym for Asymmetry, Border, Color, Dark, and Evolving, five signs that anyone’s mole might be a common yet dangerous skin cancer.
She said “After that moment I kind of regretted it. I thought, ‘you know, that was inappropriate. I shouldn’t have brought it up, maybe he already knows about it and it’s a sensitive topic. To not know for so many months what happened to this man and to finally put a name to the face and a story, it’s been incredible and truly life-changing.”
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The CEO of Schmidt Baking Company came to the rescue for drivers struck in the I95 backup. Thousands of drivers were gridlocked on a 50-mile stretch of road running through Virginia for over 24 hours after a winter storm dropped around a foot of snow on Virginia and other eastern states. The CEO ordered one of his drivers also stuck to pass bread and rolls out to the stranded cars.
A Maryland couple, Casey Holihan and John Noe, had not moved for more than 20 hours in the southbound lane of I-95 thanks to a combination of jack-knifed tractor trailers, heavy snowfall and four inches of ice that hindered rescue vehicles from clearing the road. Like many others, they had spent the night in their car in temperatures that had dipped into the 20s. After not having eaten in over 30 hours, they noticed the bread truck from Schmidt Baking Company stuck just ahead of them.
Not thinking it would work, they called the company’s customer service line and left a message asking if it was possible for the driver to open the truck and give some loaves of bread to them and others. Holihan received a phone call 20 minutes later from the owner of Baltimore-based H&S Bakery, which owns Schmidt Baking Company. Chuck Paterakis told her he was instructing the truck’s driver, Ron Hill, to open up the back and pass out some food.
The couple said they helped pass out about 300 packages of rolls and loaves of bread to people in surrounding vehicles over the course of an hour. Holihan said “We just kept giving it out until we couldn’t walk anymore because it was so freezing. It felt incredible just hearing people say thank you and hearing people just so relieved to finally have food in their car, food in their system and in their kids’ system. It was a really incredible feeling.”
Chuck Paterakis said “It was an easy decision. I’m so pleased that the people who were hungry, that hadn’t eaten for the past 24 hours, had a chance, even if it was bread, had the chance to fill their stomachs up. It was very gratifying to me. It was something I will always remember. I’m very humbled and grateful that we could help.”
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Thanks to the kindness and determination of one woman, Christmas came early at Happy Valley Elementary School in Johnson City, Tn. Mariah Walker moved to Tennessee three months ago and jumped headfirst into helping the community. Walker, who moved from California, had asked her Tik Tok followers last year to help sponsor foster kids for Christmas. “We came from California and last year, we helped some kids in foster care, like 10 of them at a local foster agency,” said Walker. “When I came here, I knew I wanted to do the same thing.”
She was already working with The Rise Up program when a chance conversation with their Amazon driver, Donnie, led her to Happy Valley Elementary. Walker’s husband told Donnie they were looking for more children to sponsor. Donnie suggested there was some need at Happy Valley Elementary, where his wife Becky works as a secretary. She once again turned to her 144,000 Tik Tok followers for help and raised $20,000 for Christmas gifts.
“I put videos out on TikTok and all my followers just bought gifts for all the kids or donated money,” said Walker. “They donated like $20,000.” Local businesses also pitched in. Walker said she got 400 gift cards from Owl’s Nest, and they donated another 50 for free and that Open Doors gave her a discount on the gift card. Walker raised enough not only to give each Happy Valley Elementary schooler a toy, book or coloring book, and candy. She also gave each and every Happy Valley Middle and High schooler a gift card. Almost 700 gift cards in total. Walker incorporated the help of a local youth group to wrap the hundreds of presents before the big day.
The gifts weren’t Walker’s only gift to the school. According to Greer, Walker and her followers bought $2,000 in books for the Happy Valley Elementary School library during their book fair earlier this fall. Happy Valley Elementary School Principal Mandy Greer said they managed to keep this a secret from the students. Greer said they are thankful for not only the gifts, but the outpouring of love from Walker, her followers, and the local community.
Before Walker “went viral,” last year she had around 8,000 followers, accrued through content meant to uplift and connect those in relatable situations. Walker said she enjoys watching and creating content related to parenting because it provides opportunities for human connection as well as escape from chaotic reality. Walker said when she asked for help sponsoring foster kids last year she realized the community building potential of Tik Tok.
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