When 14-year-old Dylan Duran asked his mother Josette to make him an extra meal, she thought he was just hungry. But soon, she found out that he had been giving the extra lunch to a boy who only had a fruit cup for lunch every day.
“I’m so proud of my son’s heart!” Josette wrote in a Facebook post. “He is so kind.”
Josette kept packing two meals for the boys until one day, when her son’s principal called her in for a meeting. The boy’s mother had found out that Josette had been feeding her son, and wanted to pay her back. Josette admitted to Today that she was a little anxious to meet the boy’s mother.
“This hit home to me because a few years ago me and my son were homeless”
“Because in this day and age, when you try to help somebody, some people get offended by it. People aren’t used to kindness,” she said. “So I was kind of scared. I didn’t want her (the mum) to think that I was stepping on her toes, or crossing boundaries, but she was very, very thankful and told me so. She told me how much she appreciated what we did.”
She couldn’t accept the money, and when she found out that Dylan’s friend’s mom was a single parent who had lost her job, she only empathised with her even more.
“This hit home to me because a few years ago me and my son were homeless,” she continued in her video. “I was sleeping in my car, I was washing him in bathrooms, and we didn’t have food.”
Read about how Josette’s good deed inspired other people to pay for other children’s lunches on the next page.
Josette is the coach for her son’s school’s volleyball team, and its players raised $400 to pay her back for the lunches. She accepted that money, but only to pay off the past-due accounts at the school cafeteria.
“So now, nobody in that school owes any money,” she said in her video. “And now everyone can eat.”
“I was taught if you can’t be nice, then you be extra nicer, and I’ve always raised my son to be that way,” Josette told Today. “I’ve always taught him to be kind and help others.”
Paying it forward
Josette hopes that her story could inspire others to help others in need as well.
“It doesn’t have to do with lunch. It could just be saying ‘hi’ to someone, or opening the door or saying, ‘yes, ma’am’ or ‘no, ma’am,’” she told Today. “It’s just about practicing kindness whenever possible.”
And Josette’s good deeds are paying themselves forward. After reading about her story on Facebook, Iowa man Jerry Fenton was inspired to pay off overdue lunch bills at his old elementary school. Though the balance was $400, he wrote a check for $700 to take care of future lunch bills as well, reports iHeartRadio.
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