A son inspired his mother to act selflessly, sparking a chain reaction of awesomeness.
For the past two months, Josette Duran of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been packing two lunches for her 14-year-old son, Dylan. When he first asked her to make him an extra meal, she figured he was just hungrier than usual. But eventually he told her he’d been giving the spare lunches to a boy who only had a fruit cup to eat each day.
Duran, proud of her son, continued packing two meals — and left the boys encouraging sticky notes to read at lunch — until one day the principal at her son’s school called her in for a meeting, per KOAT, an ABC affiliate in Albuquerque.
The other boy’s mother had found out that Duran was feeding her son and wanted to pay her back.
“She says, ‘I know this isn’t much, but I just got a job, and I know you’ve been feeding my son,’” Duran explained in a Facebook video she posted on Oct. 14. Her original post no longer exists, but Iowa-based news station KCCI re-posted a version of it:
But Duran refused the money.
Duran also said, per KCCI, that the players on the volleyball team she coaches raised $400 to pay her back for the good deed. She took that money and used it to pay off past-due accounts for kids at her son’s school cafeteria.
“So now, nobody in that school owes any money,” she said in the video above. “And now everyone can eat.”
Duran’s good deed is now inspiring others.
On Oct. 18, Iowa man Jerry Fenton wrote a $700 check to pay off overdue lunch bills for kids at a local elementary school he attended as a child. Fenton told The Des Moines Register that he felt encouraged to donate after hearing Duran’s story.
“I don’t want to tell people what to do ... but it’s always nice when people do nice things,” he said.