Guest Blog Post: Kindness of Strangers

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” 
~Desmond Tutu

This story is shared with permission from my friend Kirstin Bloy.

"In February 1994 I was in Aberdeen, Scotland trying to take a bus back to London. I misread the 24hr time table and missed the last bus back to London at 20:00 (which is NOT 10 p.m.). I literally had nowhere to go until 6:30am, had all my luggage, extremely limited funds, and hadn't had much to eat that day.
I walked into a small take away pizza shop next to the bus depot to see if they had coffee and if I could maybe hang out until they closed. The 2 guys running the shop were Kurdish refugees from Syria. I told them my embarrassing tale of woe and they literally took me in on the spot.

They fed me hot pizza, took me to their modest flat, and let me stay the night. They said they knew what it was like to be cold and have no safe place to go. My plight would have been sleeping in an open air bus depot in Scotland in February. Theirs involved being tortured and beaten in their home country.

As it turned out, I stayed with them for a couple days, they showed me around a bit more of the area and ultimately put me on a bus to London where I was met by a friend of theirs who was another Muslim refugee. 

Again, a place to stay and food to eat while I sorted out my student work status.
These were all Muslim men that helped me. They were nice, kind people who didn't have to take pity on a 21 year old American student who couldn't read a damn time table. They had their own very limited resources that they shared willingly with me."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock