Zhao Yongjiu, a 56-year-old street cleaner from Shenyang, China, recently won the internet after it was revealed that over the last three decades he has helped fund the education of 37 impoverished children by donating most of his monthly salary.

Every day, the kindhearted sanitation worker leaves his home in Shenyang, China’s Liaoning Province, at 4:30 in the morning and returns at 9 p.m.. He earns a monthly salary of 2,400 yuan ($350), barely enough to make a decent living, but he somehow manages to live on way less, donating the rest to poor kids, so they can afford to go to school and get a proper education. He has been doing this for the last three decades and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Zhao estimates that during that time he has donated around 170,000 yuan ($24,750), and put 37 disadvantaged kids through school.

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The life of one garden snail may not mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but for one Israeli woman who accidentally stepped on one, cracking its brittle shell, it was enough to warrant a visit to the local vet clinic.

It’s quite in rainy in Tel Aviv this time of year, and moisture-loving garden snails are very active. They sometimes venture outside their natural habitat, and, unfortunately, some of them get stepped on by careless humans. Most of the time the snail get squashed, but, in the most fortunate cases, only their shells get damaged. If they don’t suffer major injuries to their bodies, snails will usually fix their mobile homes by drawing in calcium, but one lady in the Israeli capital didn’t want to leave anything to chance after accidentally stepping on a slow-crawling snail.

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Ajay Munot, a rich businessman in Maharashtra, India, has recently built and donated 90 houses to the poor, instead of spending the money on a lavish wedding for his daughter.

Munot had been planning to spend Rs 70-80 lakh ($115,000) on his daughter Shreya’s wedding, but after consulting with a local politician, he decided there was a better way to spend all that money. Apparently, the grains and cloth trader realized that investing in a one day event, including booking hotel rooms for all the guests was unnecessary, especially with all the poor people in need of real help. So he asked Prakash Bamb, a family friend and member of the Legislative Assembly for advice on how best to spend that money.

They both agreed that providing slum dwellers of their town with their own houses was the best idea. Munot began constructing 108 houses on two acres of land, with the goal of completing them by the day of his daughter’s wedding. He only managed to finish 90 of them by the big day, and the bride and groom, who were very supportive of the businessman’s initiative, were the ones who handed the keys to the carefully selected beneficiaries.

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In what can only be described as a touching display of kindness, the residents of a neighborhood near Shenzhen, in southern China, came together to help a total stranger sell 32 tonnes of potatoes in a single day, after he was rejected by a local wholesale market.

60-year-old Ma, a potato farmer from Qinghai Province, in northwest China, had been duped by a businessman to bring all his stock to Shenzhen and sell it at a higher price. Enticed by the prospect of a earning a higher profit for a year’s work, he paid 16,000 Yuan ($2,312) in transportation fees and traveled 2500 miles across China, a journey that took four days and four nights. But upon reaching his destination, on November 5th, Ma had his hopes shattered by the wholesaler who had promised to take his entire potato harvest off his hands, after he backed off on the deal, claiming that the potatoes were too small.

Left without a buyer, Ma had no choice but unload all 32 tonnes of potatoes on the side of the road near an industrial park in Guanlan, and try to sell some of it to passers-by. Going back home with nothing to show for his trip than the expenses incurred was not an option. But his idea wasn’t working as well as he had hoped either. “Some of his friends from Qinghai helped him contact people to buy the potatoes, but it hasn’t helped much as he has so many potatoes,” the owner of a nearby grocery store told Shenzhen Daily. But just when he was ready to give up and go home, a miracle happened.

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Fueled by a desire to bring joy to others, Campbell Remess taught himself how to sew when he was only 9 years old, and for the past three years he has created over 800 stuffed toys for sick children in hospitals.

It all started three years ago, when Campbell asked his parents if they could buy Christmas presents for kids in hospital. They were touched by his kindness, but told him that buying so many toys would be too costly. He is one of nine siblings, and buying presents presents for all of them was already a pretty expensive affair for the parents. Only Campbell didn’t let a simple “no” discourage him out of bringing a bit of joy to kids going through tough times, so he just decided to make the presents himself.

Campbell’s mother, Sonya Whittaker, thought it was a great idea, assuming he was going to make  a bunch of paintings or drawings. But then he approached her with a pattern for a stuffed animal he found online, asking if she could make any sense of it. The woman struggled with it, but eventually Campbell himself figured it out. He asked if he could use his mother’s sewing machine to make the toy, and she agreed, as long as he was careful not to sew his fingers by mistake. It took the 9-year-old boy five hours to create his first stuffed animal, but after three years of practice, he is now able to put one together in just an hour.

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When most guys attend bachelor parties, the only thing they come home with is a nasty hangover, but groom-to-be Mitchel Craddock and seven of his friends each returned with an adorable puppy.

Craddock of Vicksburg, Michigan, took family and friends to the woods in Tennessee for a 5-day bachelor getaway, but on their first morning there, they noticed a dog outside the front door of their cabin. “We were cooking bacon with the door open. The next thing you know, there’s this dog sitting right at the front door. She wouldn’t come inside, but she sat right there,” he recalled in an interview. “She was very friendly but very skittish— I thought maybe she had been booted out of a house before.” The dog refused their repeated invitations to come inside, but the guys noticed that she was hungry and thirsty, so they offered her food and water, both of which she wolfed down almost instantly.

The dog was so well behaved that Mitchell and his friends were sure that she belonged to someone, but after their first encounter she remained at their cabin. “We’d ride for 4-5 hours, or go into town, and every time we’d come back she would  either be sitting on our doorstep or under one of our trucks,” he told Mlive. He and his friends had noticed that the dog, which they had named Annie,after Little Orphan Annie, had had puppies, but her milk supply had apparently dried up. After three days of regular meals and lost of water, Annie started producing milk again, and seeing her running to the back of the cabin and barking in alarm every time a vehicle went down the road near the woodline, the guys decided to investigate.

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Cao Yinpeng, an 8-year-old from Xuzhou, East China’s Jiangsu province, underwent a rigorous fattening up regiment, in order to qualify for a bone marrow transplant necessary to save his father’s life.

Earlier this year, Cao’s father was diagnosed with leukemia and doctors told the family that he needed a hematopoietic stem cell transplant to survive. Unfortunately, there were no compatible donors within the China Marrow Donor Program, the Asian country’s marrow bank. The man’s parents were a match, but had to be ruled out due to their advanced age, which only left 8-year-old Cao Yinpeng. China’s marrow donor program website states that donors should be between the ages of 18 and 45, but doctors do make exceptions in desperate situations such as this. But while they agreed to operate on the boy to harvest the life-saving stem cells, they did make it clear that he had to reach the minimum donor weight requirement of 45kg to qualify for the procedure.

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A lonely and confused pit bull that had been waiting near a pile of garbage in the street for a whole month, after his owners moved away and left him behind, was recently rescued by a kindhearted animal lover.

Photos of Boo, a beautiful black and white pit bull, sitting on top of an old mattress and old furniture abandoned in the street, first started circulating on social media last week, after a neighbor in Mount Clemens, Michigan, posted them online. The man had watched Boo’s family pack up their belongings and driving away, leaving the dog next to a bunch of other things they didn’t want anymore. He had been feeding him for over a week, and had contacted every dog rescue in the area, but no one was willing to help the poor animal.

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When a code-enforcement officer in Frankfort, Illinois decided to donate half his liver to someone that had never met before, in order to save their life, he had no idea that person would one day become his life partner.

In March 2014, completely out of the blue, 27-years-old Heather Kruger was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer, and learned that she only had a few months left to live. Doctors told her that her only chance for survival was a liver transplant, but with so little time left, waiting for a liver from the state’s transplant list was not the best option, so they suggested finding a living donor. “They immediately told me I was going to need a transplant,” she recalls. “There was not much time to find a donor. By that time I could really feel my body shutting down.”

Her salvation came from a total stranger. Code-enforcement officer Chris Dempsey was in the lunch break room when he overheard Kruger’s cousin, Jack Dwyer, talking about her health problem and how she needed to find a donor or she would die. Dempsey had never heard about this person, let alone met her in person, but he immediately knew he wanted to help. “I spent four years in the Marine Corps and learned there never to run away from anything. So I just said to myself, ‘Hey, if I can help, I’m going to help,'” he says. So Chris just approached Dwyer and told him he wanted to get tested to see if he was a compatible donor, and it turned out that the two were a perfect match.

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Dogs, and sometimes cats, have long been used as support animals to help humans deal with a wide range of physical and psychiatric conditions, but ducks, not so much. That’s what makes Daniel Turducken Stinkbottom, the internet’s latest sweetheart, so darn special.

Daniel made international headlines a couple of days ago, after photos of him accompanying his human on an airplane were posted on Twitter and quickly went viral. It’s not every day that you get to see a duck on an airplane, especially one that’s wearing adorable red shoes and a Captain America diaper. So it’s no surprise that he caught people’s eye  – both those on the plane and millions others looking at his photos online. Mark Essig, the man’s whose photos of Daniel got the most attention, says that everyone on the plane was delighted to have a duck on board, and couldn’t stop snapping photos of him. And who could blame them, the little guys is simply too cute!

But it turns out there is more to Daniel than a pretty little head and a funny set of accessories. He is a support animal for his owner, Carla Fitzgerald, who is recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fitzgerald adopted Daniel in 2012, when he was two days old, as a pet, but being involved in a terrible accident just a year later, he became her support animal. She was a horse-and-carriage driver in Milwaukee, when a driver texting behind the wheel crashed into her carriage from behind, injuring the horse and throwing her a metal-grated drawbridge.

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A dog lover from the Pudong district of Shanghai, recently melted millions of hearts after it was revealed that he has been living on the streets of the Chinese metropolis for a decade, so he could take care of stray canines.

58-year-old Cui Hengyi started caring for injured and abandoned dogs in his city 28 years ago. He wasn’t homeless at the time, so he started bringing them into his home, and claims that at one point, in 2006, he had a whopping pooches living with him. The constant noise and the fear of disease didn’t sit too well with his neighbors, who soon started filing complaints against him. Pressured by the authorities to get rid of the animals or risk getting evicted, Cui decided that having a home wasn’t worth giving up on his furry friends, so he decided to leave his house and family behind and live in the streets to take care of stray dogs.

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The Syrian city of Aleppo is probably the most dangerous place to be living in right now, but while many of its residents have left their homes to escape the war, one man has remained behind to care for the hundreds of abandoned and stray cats.

Known as “the cat man of Aleppo”, Mohammad Alaa Jaleel has been taking care to stray felines ever since people planning to leave the city started leaving their pets in his care, knowing he loved cats. As the fighting and bombing intensified, more and more frightened animals started approaching him for food and protection, and he was always more than happy to provide them with both.  Mohammed says he started taking care of about 20 to 30 cats, but the number of feline refugees at his walled sanctuary has now swollen to over one hundred.

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Woralop, a 44-year-old homeless man from Thailand, only had nine baht (¢25) to his name when he found a Hermes leather wallet with 20,000 baht ($579USD) and several credit cards. It was more than enough to buy him food and even a place to stay for weeks, maybe months, but he chose to return it. The kind gesture would soon prove to be life-changing.

You’ve probably been asked what you would do if you found a wallet full of cash, at least once in your life. Would you keep, it, turn it in to the police, ask for a reward? This question always tests a person’s moral values, but for someone who has hit rock bottom, the answer seems pretty clear. And yet Woralop claims he didn’t even think about keeping the wallet, and even ran after the owner to return it, after seeing him dropping it by mistake. He couldn’t catch up with the man, but he went straight to the nearest police station to hand it over.

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Ever since his owner was taken to the Ruth Cardoso Hospital in Santa Catarina, Brazil, a young black dog named Negão has been patiently waiting outside the building for  him to walk out. Even though the man died of sepsis soon after his admission, the story of Negão’s loyalty has touched the heart of millions around the world.

It all started late last year when the dog’s owner, a homeless man, was taken to the hospital after developing an infection that would later prove fatal. Medical staff reported that Negão ran alongside the ambulance all the way to the hospital, watched his favorite human be carried inside and waited outside for his return. He has been waiting outside the building ever since, not knowing that the eagerly awaited reunion with his owner will never happen. Every time an ambulance arrives, the dog’s ears perk up and he follows it to see if it is carrying his master, as it did many months ago.

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For the last three years, a mystery philanthropist has been hiding $100 bills in and around the city of Salem, Oregon. A total of $50,500 worth of bills has been reported so far, but the true donated sum could be much larger.

The first hidden $100 bills were found at stores and events in Salem in May 2013, and new ones have been surfacing regularly ever since. As soon as local news network started covering the phenomenon, a number of people came out to claim responsibility for the generous act, so to make sure no one tried to steal his thunder again, the anonymous benefactor started signing the bills. A couple of people claiming to be his friends came forward to act as liaisons and confirm his signature, but they never revealed his identity, and always made sure to emphasize that this wasn’t about him, but about helping people in need and inspiring others to do the same.

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