During my recent 2-week stint as a substitute full-time English outreach teacher, I was the recipient of countless individually packaged sweets. When one is sitting for three classes in a row (1 1/2 hours each), it's not always the best idea to keep popping those chocolates and cookies and sweet bean paste dumplings into one's mouth. So, I calmly set them aside and took them with me when I left. And then, on my way to my car, detoured by the Christian school and poured my stash out on the desk in the teachers' office.
Yesterday's chocolate was different, though. It was not a student's souvenir from a recent trip or merely a kind gesture to share with their classmates during tea time-cum-Bible time. A lady overwhelmed with gratitude came up to me after class and gave me a bag with a fancy box of fine chocolates inside, ostensibly from her son.
I have never met her son, but when she walked into class last week and saw me, she exclaimed to the other students how grateful she is that I helped her son last year when he was selected for a prestigious brief internship in a teaching hospital in the U.S.A.
At that time, she was in one of my weekly English classes, and mentioned that she was very worried that her son was going to "America which is so very dangerous." I assured her I had friends near that hospital, and then quickly looked in our denomination's church directory to find a church nearby. Several e-mails later, a couple in that church invited her son to their home for dinner.
And his mother will never forget that act of kindness by strangers who took her son in.
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