Finally, He Can Retire: 5 Brilliant Stories of the Week

An awesome crowd-funding effort for an elderly couple and a heroic school bus driver were among the most uplifting stories of the week:

• Strangers Raise $250K for Elderly Popsicle Vendor: Earlier this month, 89-year-old Fidencio Sanchez was selling Mexican popsicles in Chicago. Now he'll never have to push his paleta cart again, thanks to a kind stranger. Joel Cervantes Macias spotted Sanchez struggling to push his cart in the Little Village neighborhood. It turns out Sanchez and his wife retired two months ago, but Sanchez was forced back to work when their daughter died last month. Macias couldn't shake the image, and decided to do something about it.
• She Used to Dread Lunch. Now Others Won't Have To: Natalie Hampton felt ostracized by her middle-school classmates and dreaded lunch every day because she knew she'd be sitting alone. She ended up switching schools for high school and making friends, and she didn't want to be "as bad as the people who watched me eat alone"—so the California 16-year-old created an app called Sit With Us. Calling all "ambassadors."

• Entire School Turns Out to Sing to Ailing Teacher: A beloved teacher battling cancer got a moving visit at his home in Nashville: All 400-plus students from Christian Presbyterian Academy showed up outside Ben Ellis' house to sing him their support. The spontaneous gesture came after the students learned that Ellis had stopped treatment, and he died on Friday.
• Bus Driver Saves 20 Kids From Burning Bus: If you want any bus driver taking your kids to and from school, it's Renita Smith. That's likely the feeling of nearly two dozen sets of parents in Maryland's Prince George's County after Smith yanked their children off a school bus that had burst into flames. There was no way Smith was leaving "my babies" in trouble.
• Driver Saves Kitten Stuck on Highway: A surveillance video of a busy highway in Russia melted hearts around the world this week. In it, a tiny kitten can be seen in the middle of the road in Kalingrad on Monday as several vehicles drive around it in near-misses. Then a Good Samaritan decided not to drive away.

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