One kind deed can be a game-changer for many people. Life can be challenging for a lot of us, especially those who are not born with the financial leverage to give us a boost in life. Our story today is of a woman who was down on her luck. She was a refugee from former Yugoslavia who had moved to America with her older sister in 1999. They were given a blessing from a stranger and, eventually, they began trying to search for this person so that they could share their gratitude!

Ayda Zugay and her older sister, Vanja, kept this bag packed at all times if they needed to leave in a rush, something they had grown used to being refugees. Their apartment home in Boston was bland, with no decoration and no keepsakes. The only thing she has kept for a long time is an envelope that ultimately changed their lives. Ayda Zugay was 12 years old when they fled Yugoslavia with her older sister.

They simply had their clothes and a tiny bag with some essentials on their backs. It was 1999, and they were on their way to America. They sat with the entire light, and a woman approached them before they began their descent. They didn’t recognize her, and she refused to disclose her name. She simply handed them an envelope and demanded that they not open it until they arrived.

They opened the envelope, which just had Ayda’s older sister’s first name, “Tracy,” scrawled on the front. They were astounded to discover a lovely pair of earrings and a $100 cash. When they first came, the $100 cash enabled them to subsist for an entire summer. They had enough money to buy food, which helped to transform their future. Ayda and her sister were resolved to track down this Tracy, whose last name they didn’t know.

neither where she lived Their hunt is still ongoing over two decades later. Ayda recently released videos on Twitter explaining why she wants to find Tracy. “I want to be able to contact Tracy to thank her for her generosity, kindness, empathy, and accepting my sister, and I was wondering if you could help me find her,” she stated at one point in the video. Have you ever heard a family member, a friend, or anyone else tell a tale like this?”

For Ayda, who has explained it, this is a well-rehearsed story. She recalls the woman from the plane vividly, and despite the fact that she did not speak English at the time, she recalls Vanja conversing with her. She described what she remembered and what she imagined herself to be like now in the video.

She said, “Tracy, by this time, would be a middle-aged or an older woman who is amazing at tennis and had traveled for it in the past. She would have flown from Paris, where she stayed at a Holiday Inn and where she played tennis, to Amsterdam, where we met on that flight. She would have flown from Amsterdam to Minnesota, and this would have been on May 31, 1999.”

There are many things we can thank the internet for, and one of them is how easy it is for the word to spread. Friends of Tracy recognized the story from how Tracy herself had told them. They contacted her about the video. Her full name is Tracy Peck, and she’s now 70 years old.It was Tracy’s tennis coach who had solved the mystery.

She found the video and recognized the story. She said she had known Tracy as a very generous person, and it just had to be her. After a little help from some friends, Tracy managed to connect with the Zugay sisters on a Zoom call that got emotional very quickly. Tracy told the girls: “It just touched my heart so much that I just felt compelled that I had to help you in some way,” Vanja told Tracy: “Your generosity is still in me because I’ve been paying it forward ever since.”