NYT Readers Fund A Vacation For FiDi Food Vendor

FINANCIAL DISTRICT, NY — New York Times readers have raised more than $4,000 to treat a hard-working NYC food vendor and his family to a vacation. (For more New York City news, subscribe to Patch news alerts here.)

The newspaper profiled food vendor Kabir Ahmed this week, and readers quickly launched a GoFundMe campaign to help Ahmed and his family take a trip to the Caribbean. The Times followed Ahmed's day selling food at his Financial District food cart. After an early-morning commute from Jamaica, Queens, Ahmed sets up his stand on a stretch of sidewalk in lower Manhattan.

Ahmed, 46, immigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh 23 years ago, according to the Times. He now lives in Queens with his mother and his wife and their three children. He typically works five or six days a week and clocks at least eight-hour days, spending nearly all of the time standing.

"What’s hard about this job?" Mr. Ahmed says. "Everything is hard. If I get old, I can’t do it anymore."

On a good day, Ahmed will take about $125 home to his family, according to the Times profile. Some of that money is saved so that Ahmed's wife, Sheren Akter, can take their children to visit family in Bangladesh, but Akter has been thinking of a Caribbean vacation:

But last week, she suggested that they plan a Caribbean cruise for the six of them instead. Mr. Ahmed didn’t think they could afford that kind of vacation, not to mention so much time away from his cart.
But riding the E train today, peeling potatoes, changing out the empty propane tank, he’d been thinking about it all the same. What would it be like to go on a cruise, he wondered. To board a big ship with your family, to vacation as they do in the movies, to fall asleep at night without setting an alarm.

A Times reader launched the campaign on Wednesday, and readers have raised $4,242 by Friday morning, exceeding the campaign's $3,000 goal.

Lead image courtesy of Tequask on Wikimedia Commons.