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

by Logothesis, Leon

  Sophia explained to her what I had said, but both women seemed confused.

  I explained further, “I will build her a proper house with tile floors and a place to cook and everything. She’s never going to have to worry about her son sleeping in the rain again.”

  Sophia translated, shrugging her shoulders as though her English were failing her.

  “Does she understand?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Sophia said. “But you build house yourself?”

  Apparently, they weren’t too convinced of my construction abilities. Smart ladies. I told Sophia that I would make sure someone local did it. I wasn’t quite the right chap for that particular job.

  Again, Sophia translated, but this time, Seng wasn’t confused by the words; she was confused by the gesture.

  Sophia smiled, “She does not believe that someone would do this for her.”

  “You deserve this, Seng. You and Mai. You deserve a safe home.”

  As Sophia translated these last words, Seng’s eyes filled with tears. Mai looked back and forth between Sophia and his mother, as though he, too, were just beginning to understand. Seng said something to Sophia in Khmer, the Cambodian national language.

  Sophia smiled and explained, “She says thank you and that she will never forget you in her life.”

  Seng took hold of my hand, the tears now flowing down her face. We didn’t need words. This was the type of moment that I had always been seeking. It wasn’t out on the road with unending freedom. It was here, in Seng’s hut. It was getting to pay attention to someone closely enough, that I not only learned about her life, I was able to become a part of it.

  Mai came up to me and gave me a hug as he thanked me in both Khmer and English. Seng also began to smile through her tears, speaking again to Sophia.

  Now it was Sophia’s turn to start crying, “She said she’s never lived in a proper house.”

  The missionary’s words were wafting through my soul—I would learn so much more from the people I met than I could ever hope to teach them. The only thing I could do was humbly offer gratitude for the lesson.

  Before leaving the next day, I gave Mai a ride in Kindness One. As the wind whizzed through his hair, I looked over to see him smiling. It was the first time I had seen him smile, and it was the memory of that joy that followed me down the dusty road as I restarted my journey to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. Meeting Seng had shown me just how isolated one human could be. I hoped that in offering her a home, she would feel connected again to life.

  * * *

  I find that sometimes it takes a third party to restore us to our best selves. Sometimes we just can’t do it ourselves, however hard we may try. I thought back to when I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my big dreams. Like for so many people who try to break the mold of their previous existence, things weren’t going particularly well. I had come up with a big dream, which unfortunately had turned into big expectations. Big disappointment naturally followed. Those walls felt like they were closing in on me, so I decided I would find a new dream, out there, away from home.

  Had I been with Lina at the time, I am sure she would have called it running. But I called it adventure. I was going to drive from London to Mongolia. The only snafu was that I had a near head-on collision with a Romanian driver. Death missed its intended target by inches. I lived. I returned to LA, nursing big physical wounds, but on top of that, some painful emotional ones too. I felt like I had failed.

  Giving up seemed the best option. And it was tempting. So very tempting. All I had to do was pack my bags and head back to the desk job. It was safe, secure, and surrounded by familial love. I was single. And outside of my dog Winston, who could come back with me to London, I had no deep ties to my adopted home. I started making arrangements for our return and decided to have one last big party to say farewell to all my friends. Los Angeles had defeated me.

  And then that night, as the party was drawing to a close, my life changed. In walked a blonde with messy hair. I don’t know if you could call it love at first sight, but like that moment on the Calcutta Street, time seemed to stop. Over the next few hours, I told this woman about my trips around the world. I told her about my dreams. What I didn’t tell her was that I was planning on leaving.

  She looked me in the eyes and said, “I wish more people were like you. They seem to follow other people’s dreams and give up on themselves way too easily.”

  If you haven’t guessed it by now, that woman was Lina. And because of her, I ended up not giving up on my dream. For two reasons: First, because Lina doesn’t like rain, and it rains in London far more than it doesn’t; and second, because I had found someone who believed in me.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.”

  —Nelson Mandela

  My ride to the capital was uneventful. Although at this point, uneventful to me was probably a bit out of touch with reality. I spent the night with a Polish man who had moved to Cambodia after a messy divorce. He fed me, entertained me with stories about Polish heroism during World War II, and then sent me packing. You know—all in a day’s work. The next afternoon, I arrived in Phnom Penh.

  I had been to enough Asian cities by that point to expect the crush of humanity. The thick smell of frying foods and car exhaust. The honking of horns and the ever-climbing song of people yelling across food stalls and alleyways. But what I didn’t expect was the enduring charm that lived in all the busyness of Phnom Penh. Because mixed in with the new and old Asia was also, surprisingly, an unmistaken flourish of old Europe, leftovers from Cambodia’s harsh past under French rule.

  But underneath the charm of a beautiful city and the friendliness of a beautiful people was a much darker story. As a kid I had grown up with stories of the Khmer Rouge and the atrocities committed in their name. During the Communist reign of Pol Pot in the mid to late 1970s, nearly two million people were executed out of a population of eight million. Persons from foreign countries, those with ties to foreign countries, to another political party, to intellectuals, artists, and anyone else who may or may not have been dissenters were sent to what were later named the “Killing Fields,” holes in the ground that would be filled with as many as twenty thousand bodies at a time.

  Though so much of my trip had been about kindness, about connecting, about coming together despite our differences, I knew that I couldn’t pass through this part of the world and also not honor what happens in the void of all that goodwill. I had to go and see the consequences of believing that some lives should be valued more than others. That some lives don’t mean anything at all.

  When I arrived at the former killing field, I joined up with a tour group as they walked around. The guide told us about the horrors that took place in the absence of humanity. He described how the Khmer Rouge had brought prisoners out from the camp in green trucks, naked, with their eyes blindfolded and hands cuffed. When they stopped the trucks’ engines they marched all of them to the exact spot where I was standing. The victims were forced to kneel at the edge of the pits, often already filled with the stench of rotting corpses. And then the orgy of killing would begin.

  Innocent women, children, and men had been slaughtered on this very spot—by machetes, shovels, bamboo sticks, knives, and pickaxes. The Khmer Rouge tried never to use bullets. They believed that bullets were more precious than the lives they were taking away.

  The tour guide continued with his gruesome story: “Around this pit, there was one terrible tree. It was ‘The Killing Tree.’ It was that tree there.”

  He pointed only a few feet from where we all stood, a group of English-speaking tourists of many nationalities—from Germany and Australia, India and America.

  “The Khmer Rouge created a very traumatic killing here,” he explained, his eyes dark as he told us the story. “They began to find things to entert
ain themselves. They know the mother’s heart. It’s always love for their baby. So those poor mothers were brought here together with the baby and children.”

  We all braced ourselves for what was surely to come. I wasn’t sure I could stand to hear it. Again, that eternal optimist in me always wanted to believe that life could be a gentler place. How on earth do we reconcile its cruelties?

  The tour guide told us what we already suspected, but feared to imagine: “The soldiers, they decided to remove the blindfold from the mothers’ eyes, and they forced the mothers to open their eyes and watch the killing of their baby. They grabbed the baby’s ankle like a chicken or frog and the killer just smashed the baby’s head against the tree. They threw them up high into the air and they used the rifle’s bayonet and they stabbed them.”

  He stopped for a moment. I imagined he had to tell this story frequently, a constant reminder of what had happened to his people—by his own people. It was as though he woke up every day in the same nightmare, haunted by the millions who had fallen into those shallow graves.

  “But right here,” he finally spoke. “We cannot even cry. The tears become blood because the mothers already watched the baby die.”

  We continued on the tour, and afterward I asked the tour guide how he managed to do this every day. How he lived telling this tragic story over and over.

  “This is the story of my people.”

  “But doesn’t it make you sad?” I asked. “It’s the twenty-first century. We have the Internet, McDonald’s, and here we are standing in front of bones that used to cover the entire field because someone decided to commit mass genocide. How do you go back to modern life after living in this past every day?”

  “This is modern life, too,” he reminded. “Maybe not here. Maybe no more. But somewhere, this is modern life.”

  He was right. Every day these atrocities continue to happen across the world. The wrong person comes to power. The people are poor and hungry and tired. And then they become convinced that things might be better if only the enemy among them were destroyed. And so good men do terrible things, thinking all along that what they are doing is right. And years later, tourists arrive and say the words that we have all said too many times: never again.

  Our guide looked out to where we had just walked, passing the open ditches that once contained people he knew, people he might have loved. “I think it is very important that people in the world and in the second generation come to see and learn about this. So they do not forget.”

  So they do not forget.

  I hoped that every country wouldn’t have to go through this in order to learn the same lesson. But yet I knew that most of them had. America lost over six hundred thousand men and women in the Civil War, and that doesn’t even count the deaths from slavery. Britain lost over two million in the two World Wars. And that is nothing in comparison to the Russian loss of twenty-five million during World War II alone, or the Holocaust that culminated in the murder of six million Jews. The numbers are staggering. We could choke on them, and yet new wars break out every day.

  We break our hearts, and then we break our hearts again. I walked back to Kindness One and it felt like I had been on the bike for years. Everything in my body hurt; my soul was exhausted. I tried to remember that for every tragic story, for every killing field, there are a million more stories of kindness. Of people loving one another despite their differences. But I couldn’t help but wonder: Could those kindnesses ever balance out the loss?

  * * *

  I returned to the pulsating city of Phnom Penh and found a place to stay for the night. I was exhausted from what I had seen, and I was ready to begin what was going to be the last leg of my Asian journey: a small trip across the Vietnamese border and then seventy miles to my final ship back to North America. I was heading to Canada, and then I would be riding down to LA.

  I couldn’t even fathom how quickly this was all happening. I had seen so much and I knew it would feel like only a brief whoosh of time before I would be waking up again in LA—Lina in the living room, checking her emails, Winston at the foot of my bed, or more likely, licking my face. And all of this—these moments standing in front of history, walking through the stories of other people’s lives, driving across borders and traveling across oceans—all of this would be over.

  And the one thing that would connect me back to the people I had met and the places I had seen would be the gifts. Just as they had become the reason for this journey, so they would also be the greatest witness of it. The gifts would keep me in touch with Tony and Seng and Tchale. I would be emailing with Alex and Nasuh and Willy. All those lives and moments would be carried into my present. Now, I just had to get there.

  The good people at the shipping company had offered to take me back to North America for free. It was the same generous company that had helped me across the Atlantic, and now it would be getting Kindness One and me home. I would spend a few days in Ho Chi Minh city while my bike was being prepared for the long trip across the Pacific. Together, we would take a ship back to North America, back to LA, back to Lina and Winston, and—deep breath—back home.

  But God had different plans. Or what had become my new word for God—East Asian border guards.

  I left Cambodia relatively easily, getting my passport stamped in record time—well, at least in comparison to getting into Cambodia. A representative from the shipping company had even come along to smooth over the process, as I was a bit worried after my entrance into Cambodia. The first step of the process went surprisingly well. Passport stamped. Visa viewed. The second part of the process went horribly wrong.

  This is the part where you tell me that you know someone at the Vietnamese border crossing and I should have called you. Well, a little late, my friend. And even more than that, I’m not sure it would have worked. I wondered whether they would have let the president in had he dared to enter with a yellow motorbike. Because apparently, a yellow motorbike was right under an AK-47 in terms of dangerous items to allow into Vietnam. As soon as I pushed the bike up to the second checkpoint, he took one look at it and said in his best English, “Impossible for bike to Vietnam. Impossible.”

  But those words didn’t faze me—at least not at first. I could see freedom a hundred fifty feet away, so I knew I was close. Plus, if I had become an expert at nothing else on this trip, it was rejection. I asked to speak with the chief. I was told to wait thirty minutes. I stepped outside of the crowded office, and then the weather turned, rain quickly drenched me as I fought against an onslaught of other travelers all trying to seek shelter within.

  Finally, the chief came out. I was soaking wet. Kindness One was soaking wet. We needed some good news. He looked at the bike, and looked at my paper work, which I had managed to keep dry, and then repeated the words of his associates, “Impossible for bike to Vietnam, Englishman.”

  Well, he didn’t have to add the Englishman bit, but that was okay. I would find someone else. Two people saying no was just the beginning. I’d keep going. I would go through every single border guard until I found the words I was looking for: “Greetings for bike to Vietnam, Englishman.”

  I asked to speak to the chief of all chiefs—the big chief. The current chief apparently didn’t like this question, since he thrust my papers back into my hands and marched away. I waited, and then another man, who was tall and wide and looked like he should be the Head of Something, came out with four minions, including the last chap, who had gone to find him. The head chief looked at me like I was insane and shook his head as he gave the verdict, “You, inside Vietnam. Bike, back to Cambodia.”

  Things were now getting serious. So I decided that I would start crying. It had worked before. I figured the head chief and his four minions would budge once I hit my knees and started weeping. The only difference was that this time the tears were real. The head chief barked at me, “Come inside.”

  I must have been
embarrassing him in front of the other travelers. I didn’t mind. I was going to have a private audience with the chief. Once in his office, I went straight into the story. My wife, Lina. My three sons. My dog, Winston.

  “I won’t get there without my bike,” I explained. “I don’t have any money. Just my bike.”

  He squinted at me from across the table. Like others I had come across, he could not believe that an Englishman with a yellow motorbike would be doing this without any money.

  “You are fine. You have visa,” he explained as calmly as he could. “But the bike, it cannot come.”

  There was nothing more I could do. I persuaded them to place the bike in a container at the border and promised I would be back. All I knew was that in seven days, I would be getting on that ship to Canada, and I would be doing it with Kindness One in tow.

  I found my way into the center of Ho Chi Minh, without my yellow hunk of magic, and was assured by Hao, my contact at the shipping company, that they would resolve it.

  “Enjoy the sites and sounds of Vietnam,” Hao told me. “And be sure to check your email.”

  No problem—that was an order I could follow. The best part in all of this was that I wouldn’t need to worry about convincing anyone to buy gas for me!

  My days in Ho Chi Minh were spent waiting for good news and doing what I had done in every other city along the way—I searched for food and friends and places to stay. I ended up begging my way into a hotel for one night, and the next I stayed with a street cleaner. My trusty computer was always at the ready, but still no news.

  The container ship would soon be leaving for Canada, but Hao had told me not to worry. One afternoon, I decided to go out and find a bowl of noodles for lunch. Anything to take my mind off my quickly unraveling plans. I saw a girl in line in front of me and asked if she spoke English. She did and was impressed with my story. Enough to buy me lunch and hear more as we ate.