I live for all this good news. Humanity might just be OK after all, if we can keep being kind to one another. All it took to change one Popeyes employee’s life was a kindhearted man who took a few seconds to set up a GoFundMe campaign to help her get together the tuition to take a course for a nurse-assistant certification.
Donald Carter of Kansas City, Mo., had just gone to the fast-food restaurant after a long day, just trying to order some chicken, when he noticed how tired the young lady, identified as Shajuana Mays, operating the drive-thru was. So he started up a quick conversation, according to the GoFundMe page.
That was when he found out she was trying to go to nursing school.
“I could see she was so done with the fast food thing. Even still, she was polite and respectful—far from the typical employee at this same location. Although I admit, it’s been a while since I’d been,” Carter wrote.
In a YouTube video, he said that he noticed a “spark” in the young lady.
After going home and chowing down, Carter was struck by an idea. He had about 1,3000 Facebook friends, and a quick Google search told him that it took about $1,500 to put someone through a CNA (certified nursing assistant) course and pay for taking the test and the license. That means only 300 of his friends had to contribute $5, and this stranger, whom he had never met before, would be on her way toward her goal of becoming a nurse.
And that is how the “Send a Random Girl 2 Nursing School” GoFundMe got started.
“Just a random act of kindness from a few hundred strangers. Anybody down?Yes, I’m serious,” Carter quipped in his post.
Well, it turns out that 510 people were serious, and in 10 days the campaign had raised almost 10 times the original goal, according to Today, racking up $14,635.
Carter then went back to the restaurant to surprise Mays with the gift.
“I don’t even know how to describe it in words,” Mays said in the video. “It’s an emotional feeling right now that’s unexplainable, but it’s all good and happy emotions and feelings. I’m excited—I actually get to pursue something that I’ve always wanted to be doing for a very long time.”
“Any obstacles you have, we have a whole city and maybe even a nation to remove whatever roadblocks there are,” Carter said in the video. “This is not about us, it’s about you … it’s about the community supporting somebody who wants to do better.”