The Kindness Diaries: One Man's Quest to Ignite Goodwill and Transform Lives Around the World

by Logothesis, Leon

  I waded out in the warm water and looked back at the lush landscape that surrounded me. If ever there was a place to be without accommodation, this was it. The sun was receding into the sea behind me, and only a few other tourists swam in the clear water. I remembered the last line of the film, where Leonardo’s character talks about finding paradise, “And me? I still believe in paradise. Because it’s not where you go. It’s how you feel for a moment in your life when you’re a part of something. And if you find that moment . . . It lasts forever.”

  I had made it 16,955 miles (approximately) around the world. I had no place to stay. I had no money. I had no one to talk to, but I couldn’t have been happier. It was like the old man had said in Varanasi, “Live inside this moment, and do not lose this time.” I was inscribing it forever within me, memorizing the temperature of the water, the feel of the breeze across my face, the sound of the birds flying high above. I was alive and present and whole. I felt like Odysseus again, moving between exotic locales, knowing that home was getting closer, and like Odysseus, though a part of me wanted to return there, I also wondered if I could ever give this up.

  As I got out of the sea I watched the final embers of the sun disappear into the vastness of blue, and decided that I would sleep on the beach. The weather was warm and the people friendly, so why not? It wasn’t the best night’s sleep, but it was certainly not the worst. You remember Patna, don’t you?

  When the morning sun lifted itself above the green canopies of Pattaya, I decided to head toward the capital of Bangkok. If I thought India was a culture shock, Bangkok was like walking out of a monastery and into a Rolling Stones concert. Scooters flew by me; drivers honked for no apparent reason; crowded buses teamed everywhere; rickshaws shared the road with a fleet of modern cars: Hondas and Mercedes and BMWs honking and pushing their way through a cacophony of traffic. It was at once a thoroughly modern city and also one filled with people still pushing carts of vegetables.

  I headed off to backpack row: Khao San Road, where I quickly found someone to put me up for the night and went out to see the nightlife so vaunted by travelers the world over. As you might remember, The Beach also made Bangkok famous for less idyllic reasons. I was too tired to have that much fun in Bangkok. I returned back to the cheap hostel room someone had kindly rented for me to get some sleep before another day of travel.

  In the morning I headed toward the old city of Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand. The pyramid-like temples stood from an altogether different time, reaching up to the sky like giants in prayer. The old stone pyres were intricately designed with the faces of Buddhist figures, reminiscent of the statues and gargoyles of Notre Dame. There I met a local man, Kamol, who ran a taxi service. He offered to take me to his village for lunch. I followed him a short way before we arrived in a small but thriving village that survived off an equally small but steady tourist industry.

  Kamol and I took a walk around his village as he explained his plans to open up a restaurant in the nearby tourist town. Shots burst in the distance, making me instantaneously duck down.

  “My wife, she makes very good Tom Kar Khai,” Kamol explained, seemingly unfazed by the deafening sound.

  I looked around, wondering why he hadn’t heard the large explosion that I had just heard. I asked him, “Is it safe here?”

  “Oh, yes,” he replied, rather confused, and then continued on. “We think maybe more falung would like good food.”

  More pops went off in quick succession, but Kamol didn’t even flinch. I, on the other hand, was seriously frightened. I stopped walking, searching for a place to hide. Where were the shots coming from? I asked again, “Are you sure it’s safe here? There’s, like, gunshots.”

  More pops. At that point, I asked wide-eyed, “Can we go inside?”

  Finally, Kamol realized what all the fuss was about. He started to laugh, “Fireworks! You scared of fireworks?”

  I tried to regain my composure. No, I wasn’t afraid of fireworks, but as you might remember, I knew bad things could happen even in paradise. Okay, yes, I was scared of fireworks!

  Maybe because he was worried that, with my nerves, I might not make it through the night alone, Kamol offered me a place to stay. That night, I sat outside, alone in the darkened village. I could hear the clacking of pans as people cleaned up after dinner, children’s voices echoing throughout the village. They were the sounds of everyday life. The kind that frankly terrified me, but suddenly, in this strange and beautiful place, it brought me comfort.

  As I drove the next morning through the countryside to the Cambodian border, I couldn’t help but remember my first days on Kindness One. As you might recall, I had lost my side mirror on one of those first days, which by the way, was still securely sleeping in my backpack. At the time, I wondered whether I would even make it out of New York. And here I was, driving through the rice fields of Thailand on my way to Cambodia. As much as the trip had been filled with these amazing experiences, I was still awed by them. I still am. As I made my way through Thailand, I was pulled over by a policeman—not for speeding, but simply because my bike was yellow.

  “Yellow motorcycle is cool!” were his only words. I sometimes wondered how much love I would have received along my journey had my bike not been yellow. But then again, I did decide to buy a yellow bike in order to get as much attention as possible. Clearly, my plan had worked.

  As I approached the border town, more and more people began driving alongside me. It was mayhem. But I like mayhem.

  I pushed my bike up to the main gates, gave my papers to the guards, and quickly realized that this was about to become a lot harder than I had expected.

  You see, I wasn’t the only one with a passport. Kindness One also had a passport, otherwise known as a carnet. And in order to cross a border with the bike, Kindness One’s passport also needed to be stamped. And signed. And redelivered in one piece. So far I had had limited trouble with border crossings. Yes, I had had to pretend I supported my team’s archenemies, Manchester United, to get past a drunken Albanian guard, but other than that, things had gone well. Until now, because my luck was about to change.

  The first guard looked at Kindness One’s carnet and then back at the bike. Something about one of the two did not make him happy. Also to top it off, the guard didn’t speak much English. Or any English, for that matter. I tried to explain to him that in every country I had ridden through, people had signed for me, but it didn’t seem to phase him. Of course it didn’t. He had no idea what I was saying. But help was on the way. Or so I thought. My non-English-speaking border guard had gone to get reinforcements: eight other border guards. I hoped that at least one of them spoke English. The new contingent of border guards huddled around my little piece of paper, talking quickly in Thai.

  This back and forth went on for over an hour, as the sun faded into a dark and humid night. Things were not looking too good, and then, just before the office was about to close, the headman just took out a pen and signed. And then stamped. I was free.

  “Really?” I exclaimed.

  “Yes. You leave,” the officer commanded.

  I pushed the bike to the gates that would let me into Cambodia. Just one more person to charm, and I was on my way. Or so I thought. I would soon find out that I thought wrong. Again.

  I handed over my freshly signed document to the final Thai border guard. The woman looked at the carnet and again looked at the bike and handed the carnet back to me, shaking her head, “No come through.”

  No come through? I thought I just came through!

  It was about fifteen minutes before the border would close and I would be stuck in basically a no-man’s-land between Thailand and Cambodia.

  “But I already got this signed? The man next door, he—”

  She cut me off swiftly, “Sorry. You no come through.”

  I had to think quickly. I decided to go back to the chie
f and beg him to come out and tell this lady that I was free to go and that my carnet had, in fact, been signed.

  “Sorry,” he said, echoing his comrade. “This not my job.”

  “Please, sir, you don’t understand,” I begged.

  “No, you no understand. I go home now. My wife, she wait. Not my job.”

  Going home! This called for drastic action. I had to go rogue. And rogue I went. I hit my knees and clasped my hands together.

  “No, sir, I have to get to Cambodia. Tonight. I have to get home. Please save me.”

  The man was putting papers into a bag, trying with all his might to completely ignore me. I knew if there was one thing people responded to it was this: children.

  “My son,” I lied. “I need to get home to my son!”

  Look, I know it wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t entirely untrue. Winston, my dog, was like a son to me, and I knew that he would be supremely upset if I never made it back home. But even my new son back home wouldn’t change the guard’s mind.

  So I pretended to cry. Yes, I know—intensely desperate—but a man has to do what a man has to do! How else was I going to get through Cambodia and on my way back to America? I guess a strange English tourist with a yellow bike crying in the middle of your border station is bad for business because, before I knew it, the man finally sighed and said, “Okay, okay. Stand, please. I go talk.”

  I watched as the border guard walked the mammoth fifty feet to the other station, spoke quickly with the female guard, and then watched as she signed the carnet. Again. He even walked me to the gates, but I think that was just to be sure that the sobbing man who had already made him late to see his wife was actually gone for good. His parting words: “You leave.” Fine with me.

  I had made it into Cambodia. I was saved. Or should I say, once again, I thought I was saved. You see, the moment the Cambodian customs officials saw my yellow bike, they looked me up and down and sent Kindness One and me to the head of customs, just outside the border zone.

  After pleading with another chap, pulling out the tears, and even adding an extra son to the tale, my yellow bike was still denied entry into Cambodia. It was 11:30 p.m., and they told me they had to go home but we could reconvene the negotiations tomorrow. I had two choices. Sleep in Kindness One or make a run for it.

  And by “making a run for it,” I mean that I was already officially in Cambodia, so all I had to do was drive Kindness One off into the countryside. I seriously contemplated this plan of action, but my senses got the better of me. I didn’t want the Cambodian army coming after me, tanks and all, and how was Kindness One going to get out of the country without a signed document stating that she got in? Ending up in a Cambodian jail wasn’t something I wanted to have on my résumé. So I decided to sleep it off and try again in the morning.

  When morning came, I went back to the chief’s office and tried again. I thought about giving him a brown envelope, but my brown envelope would have been just that, an empty brown envelope. Nothing more. Nothing less. In the end he let us both through. To this day I still have no idea why he changed his mind. Maybe he spoke to his wife and felt pity for my two sons waiting for me back home. Or maybe it was just fate.

  I started my Cambodian adventure in earnest by driving to the legendary Angkor Wat. Built in the twelfth century, the cone-shaped temples were once the capital of the Khmer Empire, serving first as a Hindu place of worship and ultimately becoming a Buddhist temple. I met a kind German couple who paid my entry, and I found myself in the nine-hundred-year-old ruins, awed by man’s ability to build something as magnificent as nature.

  I walked through the stone pillars and felt that sense of calm that I had found in the seas off Pattaya. What a perilous few days I had had, adrenaline and fear pumping through my system, and now here I was on the other side of it. The sun began to set, and once again, I was reminded of just how small I was in the vastness of this world—its histories and mysteries. The overwhelming sculptures around me spoke to a greater permanence. These passing memories would die with me. Of course, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try to share them. Maybe that’s why I had to film everything, record every moment. I needed a witness for this life, for all the lives I was getting to be a part of.

  I walked out onto the grounds in front of the temple and met a group of American missionaries who were on their own travels around the world. I soon found out that they were doing something called the “World Race.”

  One of the youths, a heavy-bearded chap in his early twenties explained, “You go to eleven countries, a month in each country. Last month we were in Thailand, the month before that we were in China, so this is our third month.”

  “That’s amazing,” I replied. “What have you learned on your travels?”

  Each person in the group offered different answers—for the bearded fellow, it had only deepened his love for home, where freedom and convenience were paramount. Another offered, “I’ve learned a lot about love. And I guess I’ve learned, even in a short amount of time, that it doesn’t matter where you come from or what your background is, you can still have joy.”

  I nodded. I had seen the same thing. I remember Dilip carrying his son in his arms, proud of the boy, the joy that his family brought, even though they still struggled to put food on their plates. I agreed with the young man, adding, “The sad part is, at home, we have so much materialism and yet often we have so little joy.”

  Maybe if nothing else, that was what I had learned in my travels across Southeast Asia. Gross National Happiness was at the heart of that concept. In the United States (and, trust me, in England, too), it seems all we do is worry about what we don’t have. Buying is how we prove to the world that we’re okay. That we’re happy. And yet, we are often disconnected. Removed from our innate desire for human contact. In many ways the web of kindness that is woven by those less fortunate becomes a much richer tapestry than the materialism we worship in more prosperous societies.

  The group invited me to walk with them and later offered me a place to stay for the night. That night as we shared a meal (or rather they shared their meal with me), one of the young women said: “You know, the thing is, we’re supposed to be here to help, but the people we’ve met, they’ve ended up giving more to us than we could ever have given to them.”

  How right she was.

  I left my missionary friends the next day and continued on through Cambodia. Some days it felt as though I could ride Kindness One forever. And other days, I felt like I never wanted to look at that bloody bike again. That day in Cambodia was filled with more of the latter, as I begrudgingly bore toward the flat, unending horizon, hoping against hope that I might just find a place to sleep.

  Finally, I pulled over at a gas station, where I met a local woman who bought me some much needed gas. Sophia offered to bring me to a village not far from where we were, but certainly off the beaten track. She said there was no doubt I could find a place to stay there, so I offered her a ride in my sidecar, and off we headed into the unknown.

  As I had learned so many times on this journey, it was the spontaneous leaps of faith that often led to my deepest lessons. Though the village could hardly be found on a map, as people came out to greet me and offer me lunch, it seemed as though everyone in the village had roofs over their heads and food on their plates. All except one house.

  Sophia pointed it out to me and explained who lived inside.

  “Seng,” she explained, “is a woman with only one child. Her husband die from AIDS, and now she has it.”

  Sophia took me to meet Seng. “How does she support herself?” I asked.

  “She cannot do anything because of her illness,” Sophia said

  “What about her son?” I asked, wondering if he was also sick.

  Sophia replied with the one dose of good news: “Her son not have HIV.”

  We entered Seng’s small shack. The sides
were made of tin, and the roof was made of loose boards. As we sat down to talk, with Sophia working as translator, I asked Auk how she was able to get food.

  Sophia spoke briefly with Seng before reporting back: “Her relations give her food.”

  “And she lives in this house?” I asked, looking around at the open cracks in the roof and the fragile fabric of its walls. I couldn’t help but add, “What happens when it rains?”

  Seng motioned to the walls and imitated the rainfall coming through. The sadness in her eyes needed no translation.

  I found out that Seng had no food to eat that night—that she and her son, Mai, only had enough food to eat lunch. They lived on the kindness of others—isolated by a disease that Seng had not even known existed until she contracted it. She gently stroked her son’s hair—her last remaining connection to love.

  “What do you want to see for the future of your son?” I asked through Sophia.

  Sophia translated Seng’s reply: “She wants her son to study, but it is difficult because there’s no money to support him to study.”

  When the rains came, they both got wet. When the winds came, their roof fell apart. Now, I knew why I had come to this village, because it had led me to this woman and the sad and lonely life she had been forced to live. Seng had already agreed that I could stay the night in their hut, sleeping on the raised bamboo platform. Sophia would stay nearby. There was little more to say. Words could never heal Seng’s life, but I hoped to offer her something that might help.

  I asked if Sophia would translate for me again as I explained to Seng how I tried to give back along my trip.

  Sophia looked at me, waiting for me to speak. I wasn’t sure how to say it, I wasn’t even sure how I would pull it off, but I knew if I could only give one gift this entire trip, I would want it to be this: “I want to build Seng and Mai a new house.“