3.7M
VAEarlier this year, I had a phone call with a woman named Debbie about one of her toughest days as a parent. While she was carting her two sick toddlers to buy medicine, one abruptly vomited across the floor of the local shopping mall.
A passing stranger stopped, grabbed a roll of paper towel from the display in front of the chemist, and sopped up the mess – then went inside to pay for what she’d used, insisting on footing the bill. It was a small but lovely act that spoke to the decency of other people.
Working as a journalist often involves speaking to people on, or about, the worst day of their life. But for the past year I have had the tremendous pleasure of interviewing Australians (and the occasional Briton) about something very different – the acts of kindness they’ve received from a total stranger.
Guardian Australia asked readers to send in these stories, and we have been publishing them in our weekly kindness of strangers column.
Some of these acts of kindness, like the one Debbie received, have been relatively minor. Others were as life-altering as securing the recipient a place in the rehab facility that helped them beat addiction.
Each of them left an indelible mark on the recipient – enough so that they still remembered them in vivid detail, even many decades later. One woman, now in her 70s, gave me a blow-by-blow account of the surfer who saved her from drowning as a teenager.
Another septuagenarian could still remember the exact words of encouragement offered by a classmate during his daunting first year at university half a century ago.
#kindness #hope #pay
@vashascash
