After Humans of New York shared a story on Facebook about a young boy in Iran earlier this week, President Obama left a comment calling the story "inspirational."
In case you're not familiar with Humans of New York, HONY started out as a photo series featuring people from New York City. Each photo is captioned with an anecdote or piece of advice from the person in the picture.
Today, the project has over 14 million Facebook fans and HONY's creator, Brandon Stanton, has traveled around the world shooting pictures of people and telling peoples' stories.
Currently, Stanton is photographing in Iran. On Thursday, Stanton shared a photo of a father and son in Tabriz, Iran.
"Today's his tenth birthday. He's a very emotional young man," the father explains about his son in the caption. "He likes to solve other people's problems."
"He likes to solve other people's problems. One time when he was five years old, he came with me to the store and we bought two pounds of fresh apricots. I let him carry the bag home. He walked a little bit behind me the entire way. After awhile, I asked him to hand me an apricot. 'I can't,' he said. 'I've given them all away.' I knew then that I was raising a humanitarian."
Many people were inspired by the young man's story, which has already racked up over 400,000 likes and hundreds of comments from people around the world. President Obama commented using the verified White House Facebook account. He signed his post with "-bo."
"I'm going to continue doing whatever I can to make this world a place he [the boy in the picture] and every young person like him can live up to their full potential," Obama wrote in his comment.
Here's the full comment.
Facebook
President Obama is not the first politician to comment on a HONY post. Earlier this year, Hilary Clinton left a similarly heartfelt comment on a HONY photo of a young boy struggling with his sexual orientation.
