So Shines a Good Deed...

And the world is so damn weary, ya'll

It’s very easy these days to see the world as a negative place. Maybe a crazy place. Maybe a place that is totally falling apart in front of our eyes. Maybe a…okay. You get it.

But then something comes along that makes me realize something big.

Humans do suck in many, many ways. But we also do beautiful, selfless acts and create realtionships with other people we don’t even really know, out of sheer kindness and compassion.

As an example, let me introduce you to Melinda Oliver and Dave Roman. Melinda and I were teachers together at West Hills High School many moons ago; I taught English and she taught something euphemistic that was actually life skills with sex ed rolled in. I am fairly sure that class has disappeared now, along with most electives in high schools, but Melinda is retired anyway, and so am I (at least from teaching at a public high school.)

Melinda was one of those teachers who did what she knew was right for her students. When our conservative principal at the time decided we should not advocate for LGBTQ student rights, Melinda and I were the ones who pushed back on that. She was always fighting for something to help students.

She could have justifiably gone off into a nice, gentle retirement with her five daughters and husband. Instead, she got involved in a place far away, in Tanzania. She and her husband Dave visited a school there when they were traveling, a place called Manyara Ranch School. This is a modest place by our standards; students live there, sleep in bunks, often do not have clean drinking water but instead have to march to a nearby river to get it. When Dave and Melinda visited, they were thunderstruck by the sheer joy of these students and how thankful they were for their meager circumstances.  They spent a lot of time at the school getting to know the students, and their hearts were captured.

Dave Roman shows a young Manyara student how to use a screwdriver.

Then, a fire struck the school. The entire dorm was burned and damaged. It was heartbreaking. But Melinda and Dave didn’t just sit here in America, in their cozy home, and tsk-tsk at the sadness of the circumstance. They got to work.

They started a GoFund Me to raise money to repair the dorm. They started by asking for $10K and they raised it!  More goals. New bunk beds, new clothes, new school supplies.  Currently, the total is up to 27K and they are shooting for 50K. https://www.gofundme.com/f/manyara-ranch-boarding-school-dormitory-repair

Dave is currently over there for a month, helping repair things and showing students how to use tools, giving them life skills on top of the education they receive. When you read Melinda and Dave’s newsletters from Manyara, it puts a little glow in your heart. It makes you realize that human suckage is a choice, and we can all make the choice to be kind in all ways, big and small.

I know I have been consumed lately with the ugliness of American society.  I try to stay away from too much news (I use the term loosely, because the 24-hour channels mostly just breathlessly regurgitate the activities of the day). I do keep up; I read the NYTimes and watch a smidge of recap at the end of the day. Watch any of it, and it’s certainly depressing, and could absolutely cause you to just give up. Authoritarianism is trying really hard to sprout on US soil, and in other countries around the world. It’s like watching a dystopian nightmare novel play out in real time with real people and real-world consequences.

One of Melinda’s most recent newsletters

Then I receive Melinda’s newsletter update in an old-fashioned, mailed letter. Just reading it suddenly makes me feel hopeful. There are good people in the world. There are probably many more than we know. This is an example that brushed my world, so I want to share it with you in case you are feeling the need to be inoculated to the poisonous orange cloud glooping around our country’s heart like too much French Fry grease.

Good deeds and kindness are like a statin medication for the soul. They cut through the strangling blockage of crime, vengeance, anger, vitriol. They help clear the fog of despair and the panic of fear. Because even in a world as dark and scary as the one we currently inhabit, people embrace their better angels.

As Willy Wonka said, “So shines a good deed in a weary world.”

Amen, Willy. Amen.