A Thai doctor recently took to Facebook to share photos of a rather unusual patient – a cockroach that someone spotted on the side of the road after being stepped on.

Last week, Thanu Limpapattanawanich, a veterinarian from Krathum Baen, in Thailand, found himself having to save the life of a very special patient. A person came in one day with an injured cockroach that they had witnessed being accidentally stepped on by someone else. Unable to let the insect die on the side of the road, the person took it in the palm of their hand and brought it to the Sai Rak Animal Hospital. Instead of laughing at the person who brought in the bug, Dr. Limpapattanawanich took the case and treated the cockroach for free.

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A 58-year-old street cleaner in China has been hailed as a hero after it was reported that he has donated over 180,000 yuan ($27,000) to dozens of poor children in the last 30 years, despite earning a monthly salary of just 2,000 yuan ($300).

Mr. Zhao, a street cleaner from Shenyang, in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, leads a very frugal lifestyle. Most of his meals consist of simple boiled noodles, he hasn’t bought new clothes in about 30 years, and he and his family live in a very modest house. Even though he earns just 2,000 yuan per month, he could probably have  much more comfortable life if he didn’t give most of his income away. Coming from humble beginnings himself, Zhao known all about poverty, so he has dedicated the last three decades of his life to helping impoverished children, while also taking care of his own family.

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33-year-old Cai Yanqiu has spent the last three years of his life traveling through his home country in China with the sole purpose of helping homeless people in any way he can.

Cai Yanqiu’s decided to dedicate his life to helping homeless people three years ago. He had set up a small stall in Zhanjiang, China’s Guangdong, and he was waiting for customers when he saw a barefooted homeless man pass him by. That man reminded him of the devastation caused by the loss of his brother, over two decades ago. In 1994, Cai’s brother who suffered from epilepsy, disappeared from the family home, and when he was finally found, 3 days later, he was in such a bad condition that he passed away in his family’s arms. Cai remembered his mother lying in bed for days morning the loss of his brother, and after doing some crying of his own after seeing the homeless man, he decided that he couldn’t just stand by and allow other families to go through what his did.

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An Illinois man who has been offering shelter to homeless people in his Chicago neighborhood has been ordered by city officials to cease and desist or risk having his home condemned.

Greg Schiller, of Elgin, Illinois, began opening his home to a group of homeless people last month when the temperatures dropped dangerously low. He filled his unfinished basement with cots and blankets and started organizing “slumber parties” for homeless people with no place to go. He would offer them food and warm beverages and even put on movies for them to watch until the morning. Unfortunately, his kindhearted effort didn’t sit well with local authorities who are now threatening to condemn his home if he doesn’t stop his so-called parties.

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76-year-old Zhang Jiwen is almost completely deaf, but he has two able hands and a strong desire to help those less fortunate. Ever since 2012, he has been carrying building materials up a mountain in Fuling Forest Park, near the city of Chongqing, and building safe walking paths leading up from the modern road at the base all the way to an isolated village near the top. He has already completed a safe path a few hundred meters long and has started work on another leading to the water source of the village.

Zhang grew up in a village in the forests of Fuling, and even though he moved to the big city as an adult, he never forgot about his roots. When he heard about an isolated mountain village whose children had to come down precarious slopes in order to reach their school, he decided that he just had to help. For the past five years he has been taking a bus from his home in Chongqing to Fuling Forest Park to work on a better road for the village located on a mountain there.

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For the last 8 year, about 200 residents of Strunino, a small town in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast region have not had to worry about buying bread, thanks to the generosity of a local grocery store owner who has been giving it away for free.

Mamoud Shavershyan came to Russia, from Armenia, 25 years ago. He worked as an engineer, before setting up his own business, a small grocery store no different than other such stores in Strunino. But everything changed one day, 8 years ago when, sitting behind the counter, Mamoud saw an old lady counting dozens of coins to pay for a couple of loaves of bread. He found it humiliating for the pensioner and ended up giving her the bread for free. That day, he made the decision to print coupons that pensioners in Strunino could exchange for white or black bread at his store. To make sure that people knew about his offer he advertised it a local paper.

But that was only the beginning. Soon, Mamoud extended his generous offer to people with disabilities, large families with low income, and the generally poor. News spread like wildfire, and soon poor people from neighboring villages started coming by his shop to receive coupons. Today, the “Eric” grocery store in Strunino gives away around 2,000 loaves of white bread and 1,000 loaves of black bread, every month. They also regularly donate gingerbread to local kindergartens, and to coupon holders during holidays. And for their kindness, Mamoud and his family are “rewarded” with insults, racial slurs and accusations of theft…

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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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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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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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After catching a shoplifter trying to steal from a Tesco hypermarket in Malaysia, the store manager chose not to turn the man in to the police, but actually offer him a job at the very same store!

It turns out that the shoplifter, a 31-year-old father of three, had stolen food worth RM27 (about $7) out of sheer desperation, to feed his hungry children. “I had quit my job as a contract worker after my wife fell into a coma during a birth complication last week,” he told the local media. “She is still warded at the Bukit Mertajam hospital.”

The man, who is currently living with his relatives in the city, said he was walking back home after visiting his wife in the hospital, when he happened to pass by the Tesco hypermarket. His two-year-old son was hungry and tired, so they decided to go inside. “After walking for more than an hour, we went to the food section and I grabbed the pears, apples, and a few bottles of drinks.” Unfortunately, he was caught while leaving the store, and later interrogated by general manager Radzuan Ma’asan.

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While some of us find it difficult to host guests for a few weeks, this Chinese couple have generously shared their home with a mentally ill homeless person for the past 35 years.

When Xue Shunlu and his wife Li Huannv first found Xue Zhen on the streets of Fenglingdu, in China’s Shanxi Province, the poor man was in a terrible state – he was unable to talk or defend himself from bullies on the street. So the couple rescued him and took him to their house in a neighbouring village in Yuncheng city.

Although they lived in a small house and barely earned enough to support themselves, the kind couple didn’t hesitate to share everything they had with a total stranger. They told him to treat the house as his own and spent their free time teaching him to cook, clean, and take care of himself. They even allowed him to share Xue Shunlu’s family name.

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A mosque in Istanbul is creating social media buzz with its cat-friendly attitude. Stray cats looking for warmth and shelter on cold winter nights are always welcome at Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi Mosque in the city’s historical Üsküdar district.

Photographs of Mustafa Efe, the mosque’s imam (leader), playing with the feline visitors have gone viral online. According to news reports, he started allowing stray cats inside the place of worship last year, to help them escape the cold weather. The imam is apparently well-known for his good humor, diligence, and kindness towards animals.

Efe posted a few pictures and videos of the cats on his own Facebook page and one clip actually shows a mother cat carrying her babies in her mouth, one-by-one, into the mosque. “Our mosque’s Friday guests,” the imam wrote. “A surprise awaiting us at the sermon today. The kitty has found the heart of compassion and mercy.”

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12-year-old Makenna Breading-Goodrich is showing the world that you’re never too young to have social conscience. In a bid to help the homeless people in her community, she’s spent the past three winters collecting and giving away thousands of coats. She calls her initiative ‘Makenna’s Coats for a Cause’.

It all started three years ago, when Makenna watched a TV show about the hardships faced by the homeless during the cold winter months. Deeply disturbed by their plight, she soon came up with a simple solution – to go around her neighborhood, asking people to donate all the coats and jackets they could spare. All she had to do was find a way to spread the word, collect the coats, and get them to the less fortunate. Fortunately, her parents were very supportive and willing to help anyway they could.

“She said, ‘I think I can really do something to help,’” Makenna’s mother Jennifer recalled. “Any parent would look at their 9-year-old daughter with pride and tell her they’d be thrilled to help her in any way.”

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