Too good to be true? GrabCar driver lauded online for kind acts
Hindi ako nakakuha ng picture dahil madilim na at nagulat ako sa ginawa niya. But I want to share what happened. This is…
Posted by Gelica Manuel Tulauan on Sunday, February 7, 2016
The post starts out like a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking public transportation at night.
But almost halfway into the story, the reader realizes that the young GrabCar driver featured in Gelica Tulauan’s Facebook post is a good Samaritan who has been giving food, along with his friends, to homeless people in Manila.
Carlo Santiago Diaz, whose GrabCar profile was posted by Tulauan, was described as a young man whose “voice was filled with joy” as he shared stories on how he and his girlfriend would give out food and clothes to the homeless.
Tulauan posted about her experience on February 7 and it has since been shared more than 26,000 times. The Facebook post has more than 187,000 likes as of Tuesday afternoon.
In her widely shared post, she narrates how they ended up in a dark street. The driver then leaves the car carrying a paper bag. Paranoid, Tulauan starts calling her friend but she is surprised when the young man started talking to an elderly woman sleeping on the sidewalk.
“The sidewalk was dark and lonely, but the look on her face after that lit up the whole street…By this time, all thoughts of gory news headlines and horrible viral Facebook stories in my head were gone. They were replaced with a bit of relief, and a lot of shock and embarrassment for the way I acted,” she wrote.
She starts asking Diaz about what he did and the young driver shares his experience with homeless people. He says he and his friends would save money to prepare meals for the homeless. He would give out the packed meals while on duty as a GrabCar driver.
Top Gear Philippines on Facebook said the post “reads like the work of a fiction writer.”
But Tulauan was quick to defend her story.
She commented on the page, “I dunno if I should be offended or flattered with this. Lol. But I AM a writer by profession, so…yeah. I thought I’d use a bit of my skills to tell this wonderful story to the world. Hehe. But I assure you, it’s a hundred percent true. Mamatay man lahat ng kuko ko sa paa. Thank you for sharing this, TopGear!”
