| I was doing a year of voluntary service in a residential home for people with learning disabilities. It was set in an English village, deep in the countryside, quite different from my home in Sweden.
One of my fellow volunteers, a girl from from Tanzania, seemed a bit desperate, so I asked what the problem was. She told me she had a friend back home who was really struggling with her university studies. It was beginning to look like finacial difficulties would make it impossible for her to complete her course.
So this friend of mine had done something incredible: she had sent all her pocket money for the month to Tanzania to support her friend! This meant that she didn’t have much food to eat, no money to go anywhere outside the village, no money to buy any clothes, and so on.
We lived in our workplace so not being able to leave the village tended to make you go a little bit nuts after a while. Now her only chance to go anywhere was to take a bicycle, or ask for a ride. We got lunch at work during weekdays and food at other times when we worked, but everyone knew this wasn’t enough.
I was so touched that she did this for her friend and I felt I had to do something. So, during my next trip to one of the nearby towns I walked into the fair trade shop to buy some food. I didn’t have much money left myself but I thought I’d buy her an extra box of the muesli we both liked and some rice. I started talking to the woman working in the shop (who was also a volunteer) and eventually told her about my friend.
The woman looked at me, amazed. "Does she eat pasta?" she asked. "Yes," I replied.
She immediately started loading a bag with pasta, cookies, more muesli, sweets and other things until the bag was full. "Give her this for me. It’s my treat!" I couldn’t believe it but cried with happiness.
As I left the shop and to go home with my unexpected bag of food I asked the woman her name. "Just Gloria," she said. "God bless both of you!"
Imagine my friend’s face when I arranged the gifts on my kitchen table and fetched her from her room to see! I have never seen her so happy! She told me that only that morning she had been praying for God to help her get through the month. A few weeks later she found Gloria in the shop and thanked her in person.
These two extraordinary women really showed me what true kindness and compassion is, and the impression will stay with me for the rest of my life!
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