December 28th, 2024: Doing a Bit of Good.
Our “random acts of kindness” activity involves bringing gifts or food to arbitrary poor communities or places in Managua. There is no set plan; we go out and drive with a bunch of gifts and decide to stop anywhere. I like to think of the Biblical verse “even a cup of cold water to these little ones” as the motivation, but it could be that I just love the spontaneity.
Our first stop was at an intersection on Carretera Masya near Metro Centro Mall. It is a classic Nica intersection with dozens of kids begging and “semaphores” selling stuff or washing windshields for a cord or two. I grabbed 10 kids, brought them to Burger King, and let them play while we got them lunch. The playroom was more important than the food. When the food came, they took two bites, ran back to play for 10 minutes, and then returned for another two.
The picture above shows the streaks of lighter hair associated with malnutrition ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17381963/ ) and far more pervasive with kids begging on the street. In the past, I asked several parents if they would allow me to put their children in an orphanage so they could attend school and eat better. The kids are all about it, but the parents say no because kids begging in the streets are an essential source of income. Children always exude more compassion and can easily manipulate more people into giving. I was successful once in getting kids off the street with Ivana and her sister in the 90’s. I love that success story, but so many failures followed—dozens of attempts at long-term good foiled by circumstance.
As I watched the kids playing, a song from Le Miz ran through my mind. It’s the section where Valjean is about to steal the silver candlesticks from the priest, and he’s ridiculing the priest’s act of kindness:
The old fool trusted me,
he’d done his bit of good
I played the grateful serf
and thanked him like I should
But when the house was
still, I got up in the night
Took the silver, took my flight!
I am the old fool doing “a bit of good,” haunted by my inability to do more, yet never letting go of the hope that some good is always valid.
It’s a great life for a 70-year-old man painfully aware of his situation. Realistically, I’ve lived over 2/3rds of my life and have less than 1/3rd left. The scary thing is that (unless I die suddenly) the last part will include the slow mental and physical degradation many of us are destined to experience. I imagine ending up in a nursing home with dribble running off the side of my mouth as someone wheels me out on the porch to watch the sunset. But that’s not the case now. So, to death and decline, I say: “Not yet.” I still have one final act left and some acts of kindness in me that need to get out.
Make no mistake. This existential preoccupation with death comes from a love of life and the feeling that it’s been a privilege to do the little good I’ve done. I would do it all over again in a second. Too bad we don’t get do-overs for that.
