Eddie Adams didn’t have the money to buy college textbooks this semester, so he had to rely on his classmates at George Mason University to loan him theirs. He is the principal cellist in the school orchestra, but he couldn’t afford to buy or even rent a cello. That, too, he had to borrow.
That was a month ago.
After a story ran in The Washington Post about Adams’s tormented, impoverished childhood and how the cello has become his lifeline, people started donating money — more than Adams ever imagined was possible.
The day the story ran, April 13, Adams looked at a GoFundMe page that had been set up for him and saw it had reached $25,000. It was so much money, he was sure there was a technical problem with the fundraising site.
“I legitimately thought it was a glitch in the system,” said Adams, 20, who as a child moved around Northern Virginia with his mother and five siblings about seven times, including to a homeless shelter in Alexandria.
The next day when the fundraiser reached $70,000 — and hundreds of people had left comments telling him he was worth every penny — he texted his strings professor and mentor, June Huang: “I’ve been crying all day … happy tears.”
And as he refreshed the site again and again over several days, he watched in disbelief at the collective generosity of people who had read his life story and watched videos of him playing the cello.
As of last Friday, the GoFundMe donations had reached $156,75.
“I still don’t want to believe it happened because it’s too much money for me to even think about,” said Adams, who is estranged from his family and whose only home is his dorm room...
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