【推荐2】17-year-old Kenan Pala has a wealth of experience in dealing with homelessness and helping those in need.

The Rancho Bernardo student became one of the 17 young adults appointed ( 任命) to the newly revamped ( 改进的) San Diego Youth Commission by Mayor Todd Gloria in 2021. “Being on the Commission is very important and it’s an exciting new stage for my work in the community,” Pala said.

Pala started Kids4Community in 2017. The group works with local charities and volunteer organizations to encourage children 5 and up to do charity work.

Since the beginning, a major focus of Kids4Community has been to help the homeless. The group meets regularly to provide meal services and care packages (包裹) to the homeless and those in need.

Pala said his interest in helping others comes from the example set by his parents. “My parents moved here from Turkey in 1998. Life was really hard at first, but my parents said they got a lot of help from the San Diego community. They tried very hard to give back whenever and wherever help was needed,” he said.

Pala is also chair of the Lucky Ducklings Youth Advisory Board, part of the Lucky Duck Foundation, another charity with the mission of driving youth participation in community issues, particularly in helping to deal with the issue of homeless youth.

The young man has just been admitted to Yale University. At Yale, he plans to major in economics or business, because personal funds and private equity ( 私募股权) are all his interests. “I want to pursue ( 追求) a career path, but link it with my community and social work,” he said.

Meanwhile, Pala said the Commission members have already been communicating with each other through email, and he is very excited to work with like-minded people who want to make a difference.

【推荐3】Thousands of encouraging roadside signs have been planted around the world, and it’s all thanks to one woman who felt helpless in the face of mental illness.

Amy Wolff was first encouraged to start planting the encouraging signs after she had a heartbreaking discussion with a friend in May 2017. “We were hanging out with friends when one of them mentioned the growing number of people trying to kill themselves in our community,” says Wolff. “I wasn’t a doctor. I didn’t know of anyone suffering from thoughts of self-harm. What could I do?”

Then Wolff got the idea to start planting encouraging signs in people’s yards. For the following two weeks, she and her kids started knocking on people’s doors across their town of Newburg, Oregon and asking if they could put up signs with messages like “Don’t Give Up” and “Your Mistakes Don’t Define You”.

Wolff then started receiving messages from other people in the community wanting to buy the signs. Within a few days, Wolff had sold over 150 of the yard signs. That night, Wolff’s husband created a website to sell the signs.

“Within a year, we had news media in Dallas, Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland cover our movement,” she added. By the fall of 2018, Wolff set up the Don’t Give Up organization for her signs. Since she planted her first sign two years ago, she has shipped the organizations messages of encouragement to all 50 US states and 26 countries in 6 languages.

With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, the messages that Wolff has received from sign owners are meaningful. One message from Frank reads: “I just had a woman knock on my door. She began to cry and thank me for the signs in my yard. Her son had tried to kill himself and these signs were in the yard the day they came home from the hospital.”

【推荐2】Facing fierce mountain wildfires, a young man from Chongqing stepped forward to join the battle against flames.

When seeing a mountain fire break out in the city’s Fuling district on the evening of Aug 17, Yu Qiupeng, a student from Chongqing Industry and Trade Polytechnic, said: “I just felt a ‘boom’ in my head”. Without giving a second thought, he set out to join the fight against the fire.

Because of traffic restrictions, Yu had to walk to the fire scene. At around 10 pm, Yu arrived at the fire site and started working with other volunteers. When cleaning a water pipe, Yu accidentally burned his hand. “I looked up and saw a fireman next to me pouring water on another fireman who had just rushed out of the fire, and the water immediately vaporized (蒸发) into smoke,” said Yu. “I really wanted to cry at that time.”

After hours of hard efforts by firefighters and volunteers, the fire was extinguished. On the evening of Aug 18, hot embers (余烬) at two sites of the mountain fire began to burn up again. Once again Yu joined the volunteer group to put out the flames. This time, the condition of the land was more difficult. Yu needed to transport supplies on the extremely hot slope (山坡), He carried a backpack full of supplies and went back and forth more than 10 times under the burning sun.

Yu’s deeds won praise online. Video clips spreading online show him running, fighting the fire and digging isolation strips (隔离带) in the fire scenes. While people were trying to recognize the young man, Yu’s hometown also caught fire because of the continuous heat waves. The 18-year-old headed to the fire scene for a third time.

When his teacher asked: “Did you know how dangerous it was?” Yu said: “I didn’t think about it.”

【推荐3】A day at the beach has turned into weeks of pain for an Indiana teenager after she was infected (感染) with a rare disease in Florida.

12-year-old Kylei Brown and her family arrived in Destin earlier this month on vacation. After a day spent playing on a beach, Kylei woke up with an awful pain in her lower leg. Everyone just thought she played too hard and it was nothing serious and continued on with their vacation. But the next day Kylei’s pain was even worse. It was so bad that she couldn’t even walk and she developed a fever.

The family reached out to Kylei’s doctor on the way back to Indiana. The doctor told Kylei’s mother to take Kylei to the hospital, and that’s when the family found out that the infection behind her knee was necrotizing fasciitis, a rare deadly disease. It’s fast moving and l in 3 people who get it die.

“They were taking her into emergency surgery (外科手术) trying to remove the infection from her leg. And doing that, they were trying to save her leg and save her because the infection was moving so rapidly, ” Kylei’s mother said. “If it wasn’t for the quick treatments, I wouldn’t have her.”

Necrotizing fasciitis can be caused by different kinds of bacteria (细菌). The bacteria, often found in water, can enter the body through an open wound. Kylei hurt her leg on a skateboard before the family left for Florida.

“We are working with the Alabama and Indiana departments of health to collect information on this matter and decide if this was caused by a bacteria such as vibrio or any other reportable health condition,”says Emerson George, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Health.