A Random Act of Kindness Missed
My silence that day haunts me still.
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Random acts of kindness have been the hallmark of my life for as long as I can recall.
When I was six years old, Miss Ivy plucked me from the streets of Kingston, fed me, clothed me, and sent me to school for nearly two years — all because I looked like her only son, who had died in a road accident.
At a carnival in Salvador, Brazil, a White English man in the crowd lent me £500 after my back pocket was slashed and all my cash and travellers’ checks stolen. He scribbled an address in Brixton, where I could return the loan when I was ready. How surprised he was to see me standing outside his front door 10 days later, cash in hand and a big grin on my face.
Random acts of kindness from total strangers have always served to remind me of my humanity beyond the usual limiting classifications of race, gender, colour, religion, age, and sexuality. They remind us that when it comes down to it, we’re all just merely human.
So, I was shocked recently on an extended vacation in Ghana when a post office worker spoke to a very respectful young man. I’m not afraid to admit to you that the tears welled up in my eyes. You might think me a softhearted simpleton who cries at the slightest sign of injustice in the world. But deep in my heart, I felt that the great Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, or even the late Nelson Mandela might have cried, too — to see the hard, heartless creatures we have become and the way we treat our own people in Ghana.
Like me, the young man had come to the post office to collect a recorded delivery letter. The post office clerk made him tear open the package to reveal that someone abroad had sent him a cheap smartphone — another random act of kindness, perhaps. The young man looked gleeful. The phone was nothing that he couldn’t get in Ghana, but a present nonetheless, most likely because he couldn’t afford to buy one in the home market.
The post office clerk quickly whipped out her calculator and started churning out random numbers. As if to reveal her incompetence further, after what seemed like a very long time, she decided that he needed to pay 1,760,000 Ghana cedis in import duty (approximately £300,000 at the time). He asked her to repeat the amount because he could not believe it. Nor could I believe it. She crossed out the original amount she had written and replaced it with 1,760 GHS, which, after further scribblings, turned out to be 176 cedis (about $30). Mathematics, even with the aid of a calculator, obviously wasn’t her forte.
But deep in my heart, I felt that the great Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, or even the late Nelson Mandela might have cried, too — to see the hard, heartless creatures we have become and the way we treat our own people in Ghana.
The boy looked surprised. “But how am I supposed to pay 176 cedis?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question mainly brought on by the high duty fee compared to the low cost of the cheap phone. “The phone is probably not worth that much,” he continued. But it was the way she spoke to him that ultimately drew my rage.
She hit the customer with a tirade. “You ask me how you are to pay 176 cedis?” she replied with disdain. “Who are you? Are you the child of an animal? You are an idiot boy. How dare you question my authority? Go away! Move, move from here, you ugly son of a lazy whore. Look at you. Who are you?”
She spoke in a mixture of broken English and a local language; I could tell it was distasteful by the scorn etched on her face, but I had to ask my driver to translate what exactly she had screamed at the startled young man.
What shocked me most was her complete and utter contempt for the boy. She exuded a foul air of superiority and displayed the lowest levels of common human decency imaginable. It was a total disregard for another human being’s feelings, yet she was the face of customer service. I stood there watching her, with my mouth catching flies.
My better instinct wanted to pull out my wallet and throw the money in her face, just so that I could express with a random act of kindness exactly how I felt about this manipulated situation she had invented to mask her inadequacies. But I didn’t have enough cash on me.
I hesitated to catch the young man’s attention and avoided my instinct to help. By the time I’d finished collecting my package, he was gone. He had walked out and left the phone behind in its box, which the woman promptly wrapped back up in its padded envelope and threw in a heap under her desk. I was sure where that would end up.
In the scorching heat outside, people crawled around the post office building like ants around the entrance to a nest. I tried looking for the young man in passing, thinking that we could make it to a cashpoint machine in the car, but he seemed to have vanished. I couldn’t see him anywhere.
All the way home in the car, and for weeks afterwards, the incident played in my mind. The young man at the post office had reminded me of myself all those years ago when I was a boy. I should have spoken up and should not have just watched as the situation unfolded. My silence at the time troubles me still. Was I not complicit?
