SINGAPORE - Yishun Primary School student Ashvin Gunasegaran, 12, received a Public Spiritedness Award from the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) on Thursday (June 2) for helping two accident victims after witnessing a collision.
Every so often, stories about altruistic individuals who step up when they see another in need restore our faith in humanity.
Here are five more heartwarmers from The Straits Times archives:
1. Heave-ho
South Korean Kim Seong Mo fractured his right leg after a trailer truck fell on him on July 22, 2015, but his injuries could have been worse.
About 30 people, who witnessed the accident at the junction of Bendemeer Road and Boon Keng Road, came together to lift the massive truck - estimated to be at least 5 tonnes in weight.
Mr Kim was pulled out from under the truck by two of the rescuers. A 90-second video of the incident went viral.
2. Urgent delivery
On that same day, Mr Syed Zukarnain and his wife rushed a young woman due to deliver her baby through morning traffic.
They were on the way out of a carpark in Bukit Panjang at around 9am when he saw the woman lying at a staircase by the side of the road, in pain.
She was going to give birth but she and her husband had been trying in vain to get a taxi for an hour. Mr Syed asked them to get into his car and rushed them down to the Singapore General Hospital.
The baby couldn't wait, and was delivered in Mr Syed's seven-seater Chevrolet on the AYE near the Lower Delta Road exit.
3. High-rise rescue
Two acrobatic foreign workers, Mr Subramanian Shanmuganathan and Mr Ponnan Muthukumar, saved a two-year-old girl from a potentially dangerous fall in April last year.
They saw the toddler dangling precariously from the second floor of a Housing Board block in Jurong East. Her head was stuck between a laundry pole and the ledge of her flat's service yard.
The pair scaled a water pipe to reach her and returned her to safety.
They each received the SCDF Public Spiritedness Award for their heroic act.
4. Humane wall
Kind passers-by formed a human wall to protect a woman who had fainted on the road from oncoming traffic in an incident that happened in November last year.
She apparently had a dizzy spell and hit her head on a bus, collapsing to the ground along Eu Tong Sen Street in Chinatown. Those nearby not only protected her from the cars at rush hour, but tended to her wounds with ice.
5. Act of grace
Good Samaritan Noriza A. Mansor was named the first Straits Times Singaporean of the Year for her kind act which touched many.
In October 2014, Madam Noriza, then 49, noticed an elderly man at a Toa Payoh FairPrice supermarket who had dried faeces smeared all over his lower body .
Instead of walking away, the sales promoter helped Mr Tan Soy Yong, then 76.
She bought him a new pair of shorts, grabbed a box of tissue paper and a pail of water and cleaned him up. Her act moved one bystander to tears.
Madam Noriza then accompanied Mr Tan and his wife in a taxi to their home to make sure they were okay.
After the incident, she spent many days off visiting Mr Tan and his wife, Madam Lee Bee Yian, even after they were hospitalised and moved into nursing homes.
