This video proves that a person’s integrity goes far beyond what meets the eye. In a video uploaded to YouTube, prankster Josh Paler Lin gives $100 to a homeless man and secretly follows him to find out how it’s spent.
The homeless man is seen on camera buying food and giving it to strangers in the park. The sight turns Lin’s perception of homelessness on its head. Lin says he is “stunned” and admits he thought the man might buy alcohol. “You just touched my heart,” Lin told him.
While the gesture left the prankster so emotional that he decided to donate another $100, he also had something to offer Lin:
“There’s a lot of people that are just victims of circumstance,” the homeless man told him. “And they didn’t go homeless because they’re lazy …It could be a divorce, and one thing leads to another. A man sells his boat, his home, and all of a sudden he finds out he has no money. There’s a lot of good people that are homeless.”
The homeless man Josh gave the money to, Thomas, has been very down on his luck lately. He quit his job to spend time taking care of his sick parents. Unfortunately, he lost both of his parents in the last couple of months due to cancer and kidney failure. Additionally, he lost his parents’ condo and found himself jobless and homeless on the street. Although he has nothing at this point of life, he still managed to help others when he received something.
Immediatly after releasing this video, Josh was overwhelemd with messages from people wanting to know how they could donate money to Thomas, so the young man set up a campaign on fundraising site IndieGoGo that has already raised over $27,000 in a day.
The #letshelpthomas hashtag has also garnered plenty of momentum on social media.
sources: huffpost