Most of the time, social media is blamed for decreasing genuine human interaction. This story is quite the opposite.
After an accident left him paralyzed a year and a half ago, Ibrahim, a 24-year-old Saudi man, ended up bedridden at Riyadh's King Khaled Hospital. Over time, visits from his family became less and less frequent, reports Al Jazeera, until his loneliness reached a breaking point last week, several months after he'd last seen his family.
That's when Ibrahim created a Twitter account hoping to communicate with the outside world.
"You know? There is no one visiting me now," he posted, in a tweet translated to English by Gulf News. "Not even my brothers or my father! The patients next to me have regular visitors, but no one comes to see me."
He added in a second tweet, "I wish those who know me and those who do not know me would come to visit me. I have become restless, just waiting for someone to visit me. My father and brothers had not visited me for three months."
Remarkably, his tweets gained traction on the popular social media site. Within an hour, after Ibrahim tweeted instructions on where he could be found, Saudis began to visit him in the hospital.
"We should be there for one another in times of need," a group of students from King Saud University told Arab News, explaining their decision to pop in and say hello.
From there, Ibrahim's popularity exploded, with scores of people visiting the man, often with flowers, encouraging notes and other gifts in tow.
Photos of visitors smiling with Ibrahim spread across the internet:
#علاج_ابراهيم
#زيارة_إبراهيم
أسأل الله الكريم رب العرش العظيم أن يشفيك
فيكم الخير ربي يجزاكم الخير ع زيارته pic.twitter.com/LSn8BJpp5O— ماجد الحميدان (@Majed_080) May 11, 2014
According to Al Arabiya, a Saudi businessman has launched a campaign to cover the cost of sending Ibrahim to Germany for specialized healthcare, at a cost upwards of $500,000.
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