Acts of Kindness

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9/21/06
So I have been meaning to write for a while and finally the time has come. And though I have a million things that I was going to write about, the following was not one of them
Today I was reading Margot Schaal’s blog; for those of you who don’t know who this is, she is the mother of my friend Kaneza from Wesleyan, and she is right now living in Rwanda. Among other things, she is teaching yoga/feldenkreis classes for a UN group there (I think that is right). But in her short email to a group of friends she mentions very briefly a developing friendship between her and a guardian of a house near where she lives. The relationship began one day when the man offered Margot some food, knowing that she had not had dinner. And Margot, knowing that this food was offered to her despite the fact that the man barely made enough money to feed his family, gave him a small amount of money (symbolic) in return. Forgive me, Margot, for I am not telling this story with much elegance and possibly without the exactness with which you told it.
But of all that you wrote, this touched me the most, and it made me think about how over the past four months I have been so dependent upon others, that this web of travel I have been on would have been impossible, and lifeless, if not for these moments of kindness that people have shared with me.
When I boarded the 48 hour bus from Lithuania to Vienna, I sat next to a young Lithuanian guy named Povilas who, within moments of us meeting, said to me, “are you hungry? Of course you are!!” “I knew I was going to meet someone like you on my journey,” he said. Then he opened his bag, which was filled with food, and we ate. And whenever either of us was hungry again, we ate. His food was the perfect amount to get us both through the 48 hours bus ride.
When I was in Paris, going from the train station to the airport to catch my flight to Berlin, I was a bit lost and asked two teenagers for directions to the airport tram. It turned out to be not exactly where I thought it was, and along with explaining to me how to get there the two of them walked with me to the tram stop. When I told them that my flight was not until the morning they offered me to stay at their folks’ place, but I declined.
I think also of Daniel and Christian, my Immenstadt friends who picked me up at a gas station and took me along for the ride over the next four days.
I think of Sigitas, the Kaunas (Lithuania) baseball coach who has offered me kindness in so many ways. The past two and a half weeks, I stayed in his flat with his wife and son, sleeping on the couch. Linna, his wife, fed me everyday. Whenever I needed a ride, he would take me, even if it was late in the evening. And more than all of this, he shared so much of himself and was open to learning about me in our numerous conversations over the two months that I was in Lithuania. Sort of a silent, unspoken kindness.

More recently, I was in Nida on the Corunian Spit, the jut of land along the Baltic Coast extending from Lithuania to Poland. I left Kaunas with my friend Viktorija to spend a few days at the coast staying with her aunt; this particular day we were in Nida, a beautiful and unique place with massive sand dunes that tumble right down into the water, and that stretch all the way into Russia (if you look on a map, you will see there is a small bit of Russia on the western border of Lithuania).
We had read the bus schedule wrong, and thus had missed the final bus from Nida back to the town where we were staying. Rather than staying in Nida for the night, we decided to try to catch a ride and that the worst that could happen would be we would have to walk back to Juodkrante. At the time this seemed normal and logical, even though Juodkrante is a good 30 km from Nida.
So we began walking, and for the first hour we had no luck. We had walked about 8 km, it was already 10:15 at night, when a car came zooming past, then stopped abruptly about thirty meters ahead of us. We ran ahead, I stuck my head in and asked the driver, in the broken Lithuanian phrasing that Viktorija had instructed me to do, if he could give us a lift to Juodkrante. Sure, he said, so we got in. Viktorija and the driver began talking, and for the next twenty minutes or so I sat in silence and tried my best to make out what the two of them were saying.

Something about mushrooms, a good season this summer, the water is warm….he was in the forest, I don’t know really…….

The man drove us right to our door, we said good night and headed up the steps, very happy to finally be home. Viktorija explained to me that this man was actually the bus driver for the Nida-Juodkrante route. On his last leg from Juodkrante to Nida he saw us on the road and knew we were walking because we had missed the last bus of the day. So once he arrived in Nida, he went home, got his car, and sped off looking for us to give us a lift. We got home just before 11:00.

What a beautiful thing.

I wonder to myself how many opportunities we have in our daily lives to do things like this. I know there are so many, and I imagine we could all think of moments both when we were the person doing the good deed, and the one being graced by someone else’s kindness. But I wonder also how many of these moments we miss simply because we are not looking for them or open to them, both as the giver and receiver.
I don’t even know the driver’s name, but I am thankful that he saw us on the road and gave us a lift.

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Comments

[aileen]

cheers to them
reading this entry reminded me of the living saints i met during my travels through italy. in casale monferato, i met antonio, a bus driver with whom i caught a ride into the city one day. when i asked about return trips, he replied that there were none but that he would take me himself. i thought he would make the extra trip in his bus, but instead he came to pick me up in his own car. then, in ferrarra, i injured my back so badly that i couldn't walk or sit straight. i don't remember how i found her or she found me, but a healer named anna took me into her house, fed me, and massaged me with her miraculous hands. neither antonio nor anna asked for anything in return.

[Passerby]

Another act of kindness in Lithuania
We were travelling through North Western Lithuania with our trusty Landies when one of them lost a wheel - flew right off (probably some undetected rust). Thankfully the car came to a stop and we were left to our own devices when out of nowhere came along a huge truck (I think it was with Russian plates, my wife thinks it was Lithuanian but we don't know which one was the driver) and the driver came out took a serious look at the car, brought his heavy duty jack out and started working on it. "No problem" apparently is a phrase that is understood worldwide. Within twenty minutes we were on our way, still too shocked even to notice that we haven't taken his name, number or anything to thank him except a hushed "thank you so much". So for this wonderful truck driver - THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH.

[Vilius]

how was lithuania?
Great to hear another lithuanian success story (of sorts). I am also glad the trucker stopped. Where were you travelling in lithuania? Where are you all from? Who are you?? I am glad you read my blog. :)