TJ KIM lives in Bethesda, Maryland. He doesn’t have a driver’s license yet, but he is an expert pilot. He has been taking flight lessons for a year and dreams of becoming a Navy pilot. But in the meantime, with the help of his father, he is using his skills by bringing relief supplies to remote hospitals in distant rural areas.

TJ Kim hoped to continue his beloved lacrosse championship. But now that his high school is closed and every sporting activity has stopped, he has managed to find a way to combine another passion of his with the need to help others.

His targets are hospitals in the west of neighboring Virginia, sparsely populated and largely forgotten mountainous and rural areas.

Its load is composed of disinfectants, masks and protective gloves. Thousands of essential objects collected through the solidarity of friends and neighbors.. TJ nicknamed his mission “Operation Sos” (Supplies Over Skies).

His first mission took place on March 27 when he landed in Luray, in the Shenandoha Valley, northwestern Vrginia. The hospital in the town welcomed the sixteen-year-old pilot as a savior: “Everyone thinks about the big hospitals of big cities – they told him – and they forget about us”.

TJ has promised that he will regularly bring help to seven rural hospitals in western Virginia.

He’s not the only young man who is acting so generously: there are other cases of young people who work as volunteers to help in the epidemic. In New York, 1,500 young people offer to go shopping for the elderly. And not only that: they are also willing to have long chats on the phone with lonely people who need to hear someone’s voice.

Similar groups have now sprung up all over the place. They bring food for the elderly and the sick, take the dog out for a walk, water the lawns, take out thetrash, sew masks fas directed by hospitals.

Watch the interview here: