One day about two weeks ago, I was headed to Shambu
(the next town over) on a public bus. While I was waiting for the bus to fill
up, an elderly woman came onto the bus and reserved the two seats in front of
me. She disappeared, and when she returned, she was helping another woman onto
the bus, who appeared to be both mentally and physically disabled. They got
themselves settled, and my attention returned to my Kindle until a few minutes
after the bus had left the station.
The driver’s assistant had started collecting the
bus fare, and gathering what I could from the Afan Oromo conversation that
ensued, she didn’t have enough money. She had been told it was only 10 birr per
person, when in fact the price is 21 birr per person. Upon learning that she
had less than half the required funds, she began to cry.
The bus was silent for a moment, and then one after
another, 3 passengers pulled their wallets out of their pockets, saying, “I can
give 5 birr.” There was a pause, and then one of them urged the rest of the
bus, “Come on, we only need 6 more birr!” More wallets were opened, and enough
money was pooled to allow the elderly woman and her companion to make the trip
to Shambu.
That was an inspiring, heart-warming experience
that will stay with me for a long time, but it’s only one example of the
generosity that I witness every day here in Fincha and throughout Ethiopia. My
neighbors live in a mud and straw house and their living room furniture is
wooden benches because that’s all they can afford, but they share their lunch
with me and invite me over to drink their coffee almost every day. When my
parents and I were leaving Fincha after their visit, they insisted that I wake
them up at 5 AM so that they could accompany us to the bus station. When my
porch was getting dirty, the little boy on my compound voluntarily scrubbed it
clean for me, and every time I arrive in Fincha after a trip, a group of
children fairly rips my bags off of me so that they can carry them for me up
the hill to my house.
Back home in the States, it’s now the Holiday
season: the season of giving. All too often though, the definition of giving is
limited to impersonal donations. Here, my neighbors, friends and even strangers
on a bus are teaching me instead how to give of myself directly to a person in
need, to my neighbors, and of course, to the people I love. How many Americans
would scrub their neighbor’s porch, wake up at 5 AM to accompany them to the
bus station, open their homes to their neighbors on a daily basis, or respond
to an immediate situation to help a stranger pay her bus fare?
This is one of the big lessons I want to take home
with me when my service is completed: to give of myself in ways that may not be
convenient, are not necessarily pleasant, or require me to actually reach out
to a stranger. Think what a world we would live in if more of us did that! And
in fact, if the definition of giving included random and/or frequent acts of
kindness, then thin pocketbooks this holiday season wouldn’t diminish people’s
capacity to give in the slightest.
