NYC cabbie Mansoor Khalid gives his fares a little extra when they ride with him - his backseat is full of candy, as much as they want to eat, all included in the price. After losing his young son a few years back, h e decided that it was his mission to spread joy and happiness to the people of NYC, who are routinely overworked and overstressed.
(Khalid in his cab with the candy he gives his passengers.)
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti left Leon Gaisili paralyzed from the waist down, making an already difficult life even more difficult for Leon, his wife and his eight children (eight!).
The Walkabout Foundation heard about this and gave him a wheelchair so that he could get out of his hospital bed and start rebuilding his life. And this year Gaisili participated in the 2012 London Paralympics.
The Walkabout Foundation is continuing it mission of getting sturdy, low-cost wheelchairs to the people who need them most. Read more about it here.
In Plaquemines Parish, LA, Hurricane Isaac's floodwaters came up so fast that emergency crews couldn't get in to evacuate the parish's residents. So Jesse Shaffer, Sr. and his son went around in a boat and rescued people from their homes, sometimes hacking away at barriers and braving stiff winds to rescue trapped and stranded people. In all, they rescued 120 people from the flood.
Now that the waters are beginning to subside, they're guiding people back to their homes.
Says one of the people they rescued:
"This man here, Jesse, I called him and said my son and grandson were trapped, and he said 'I'm on my way,'" said Mary Williams, 66, who couldn't enter her home on Saturday because the water still was too high. "Him, he needs to go to the President. He needs to be a national hero."
A nonprofit called Hopscotch Detroit plans on bringing together people from all over Detroit today to create the world's largest hopscotch course. In a city that's had its share of hard hits in the past couple of decades, the organization hopes that this will bring people together in the spirit of fun and community.
Also planned are several large chalkboard murals, and all the chalk has been donated by a local office supply company.
Ajooni Sethi, one of the organizers, is optimistic about the event's turnout.
“Positive, exciting, and inspiring things are brewing and alive in Detroit,” Sethi says. “We all share common ground. Sometimes we just need to draw on it to realize the fact."
17-year-old Catherine Wong from New Jersey found a problem (crucially-needed hear monitoring equipment is often too expensive for people in the developing world) and then created a solution using off-the-shelf electronics.
Not only is this new electrocardiogram machine amazing, but it's also able to send results wirelessly to a cell phone and then to a diagnosing physician, which means that it also solves the problem of physicians not being able to travel to all the patients who need them.
And Catherine isn't done.
"I'm going to keep going on this project, making it smaller, cheaper, more durable," she said. Her dream: to actually get it working for patients in developing countries. "That's who I aimed the project at, and that's who I'm working for."
David Boone was a ggood student. He was motivated, got good grades, and planned on going to college. One little problem, though: he became homeless at the age of 14.
A school nurse and his principal found out about this and took him in, and this fall he'll be attending Harvard University as a freshman.
This just goes to show how a good mentor and someone seeing a person's potential can change that person's life.
"My principal had given me Ron Suskind’s book A Hope in the Unseen about Cedric Jennings' journey from the inner city to the Ivy League," writes Boone. "That story gave me the courage not only to apply to college, but also to aim for academically rigorous schools."
Almost exactly a year ago, a kid named Caine got bored at his dad's auto shop and made an arcade out of a bunch of cardboard boxes. A guy who needed a part for his car stopped by and saw Caine's arcade, and became its first customer. The guy also happened to be a filmmaker, and he made a little documentary about Caine and his arcade:
The Kickstarter campaign generated over $200,000 for Caine's college fund.
And then it kept going. Caine and the filmmaker issued a challenge to kids everywhere, urging them to get out and make things and innovate.
So a year later, there's a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging kids to innovate and learn and explore, and an associated Global Day of Play, when everybody all over the world can create and play and learn, just like Caine.
