International superstar and happens-to-be-a-New-Zealander Ella Yelich-O’Connor, more popularly known as Royals, is receiving enormous praise from her fellow citizens and socially minded politicians this week, after donating a small rounding error from her bank account to a Lower Hutt charity that helps to feed children food they don’t want to eat, like bananas, and other fruits.
The charity, Fuel the Need, received $20,000 from Royals, as well as a heartwarming message from her that read:
“Hi Manuel, my accountant has made a minor rounding error this week to the tune of $40,000. I don’t know what to do with it and it would probably be good to get tax credits from it so I guess you can have half.”
Manuel Dalton, who runs the charity, said he was “blown away” by the message, and words couldn’t express how much he’d like to make that much money a week.
“It was just, wow, that’s a lot of money. I wish I earned that kind of money,” he said. “It’s good to feed the kids, too, but I just mean, wow. She’s rich.”
Dalton said he would put the money to great use, and it would have a “massive impact” on his local community.
“We’ve got kids, about fifty kids that we feed. These are kids who are getting sent to school with jafas, and party mixes, and jetplanes, cola bottle lollies, Cody’s 7%, you name it. They love it, actually. But we give them, you know, oranges.”
Dalton said the children he feeds go “wide-eyed” when they see a piece of fruit.
“They hate it, really, they just loathe us, but you know, you have to do what’s right.”
Labour Party leader Andrew Little, seizing the opportunity to show young New Zealanders that he knows who Royals is, said it was both “wonderful” and “encouraging” that she would donate roughly 0.2% of her net worth to charity.
“It’s the spirit of it that I thinks gets all kiwis right here,” he said, pointing to the area of his body he believes his heart to be in. “It makes you think, if average kiwis all donated 0.2% of our net worth to charity, we could have, you know, maybe a few dollars.”
David Seymour, de facto leader of the ACT Party, agreed with Little, saying that “if we could all be a little bit like Royals,” then we wouldn’t need a Government, and everything would just run itself, kind of like trains.
Emerging tabloid paper, the New Zealand Herald, reports that Royals spent the other half of her $40,000 rounding error on a mat.