Michael Todd wore the same clothes every day for the first three weeks of school. When the other kids began to notice that he was wearing the same black pants and blue, teal, and gray long-sleeve shirt day after day, Todd, a freshman at Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School in Memphis, became the target of laughter. But there was little Todd could do. His mother simply couldn’t afford to buy him new clothes.

Two of the kids piling on were Antwan Garrett and Kristopher Graham, a pair of freshman football players. But over time, they realized that their disparaging words felt like bullying and seemed to be slowly crushing Todd’s spirit. Something finally clicked.

“I felt like I needed to do something,” Graham told CBS News. So he and Garrett hatched a plan. They went home and hunted through their own drawers and closets. The next day at school, they met Todd at their third-period class and asked him to come into the hall. Todd was understandably nervous about being called out by the larger boys.

“He wasn’t smiling or anything, and I was like, ‘I think this is going to make you smile,’ ” Graham says. “I told him, ‘We’re in the same third period, and I apologize for laughing at you, and I want to give something to you to make it up.’ ” He then handed Todd a bag. Inside were cleanshirts and shorts, plus a brand-new pair of New Balance sneakers.

Todd was blown away. “I was very happy,” he told WATN-TV. “Shocked, completely.”

And Todd got much more than a new wardrobe. He no longer sits alone at lunch. Now he eats with his new friends, Garrett and Graham.

“I’ve been bullied my entire life,” Todd told CBS News. Reflecting on the day Garrett and Graham called him into the hall, he called it “the best day of my entire life, basically.”

Nineteen-year-old Ananya Saluja finds great happiness in bringing a smile to a person’s face. This encourages her to work for the well-being of those in need, all through the year. She volunteers during her summer break in the villages around the town of Leh, Ladakh, Kashmir, and raises money to build libraries for poor children during her school time.

Four years ago, Ananya was an ordinary student with common worries such as studies and exams. She studies at The Shri Ram School in Moulsari, Gurugram, and she got the chance to teach poor children as a part of the community service programme of the school. After finishing the programme, she felt excited and decided to continue with the cause on her own. Ananya said, “During the programme, I got really close to those children. The happiness on their faces after having understood something was worth anything in the world.”

Her summer visits to Ladakh have now become an important part of her life. She visited villages like Liktsey, Turtuk and Tialing in 2015，to teach children. During the summer of 2016, she visited Matho in Leh district where she helped set up a playground for children.

“Since I couldn’t give more than a few weeks of my time every year, I decided to help in other ways. I decided to help them raise money and set up libraries in Ladakh,”said Ananya.

Ananya has raised money to set up 19 libraries. For her, this is just the beginning. She plans to continue the cause and do everything that she can for her kids in Kashmir.

I am a writer. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke (唤起) an emotion, a visual image, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.

Born into a Chinese family that had recently arrived in California, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” English. But feel embarrassed to say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken”, as if it lacked a certain wholeness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions(认识)”.

I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.

I started writing fiction in 1985. And for reasons I won’t get into today, I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”, her internal (内在的) language, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure: I wanted to catch what language ability tests can never show her intention, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.