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CHAPTER

3

LESS IS MORE THAN YOU THINK

“I opened two gifts this morning. They were my eyes.”

—OFTEN ATTRIBUTED TO ZIG ZIGLAR

I WAS FINALLY on my way. I was off to meet with the CEO of a nonprofit I’d been hoping to work with for years. I rarely rehearse conversations, but this time I had, and I’d also taken more care than usual with my clothes. Instead of my normal button-down shirt and jeans, I was wearing a jacket, khakis and well-polished shoes, all carefully chosen the night before. I’d also transferred all my stuff—notepad, pens, business cards, mints—from my backpack to a fancy satchel I use for situations like this. I was ready.

About thirty minutes into the drive, I noticed I was almost on “empty” and I pulled into a gas station in a rough part of North Philadelphia. This was one of those gas stations where the employees are sequestered behind a protective window along with everything that’s for sale. As I got out of the car and reached for my wallet, I realized I’d forgotten it.

I checked out the surroundings. On the benches outside the entrance, a couple of guys were apparently sleeping off hangovers. I took a few deep breaths and closed my eyes. Why am I so freakin’ forgetful?

I began tearing the car apart in search of at least a few dollars that might have been left behind. I combed the floor, scoured the trunk and dug out everything from under the seats. I even pulled out my son’s car seat just in case he’d been squirreling away money there. When I was done, all I had to show for my efforts were two umbrellas, a mini ninja figure, granola bar wrappers, a handful of Angry Birds toys, a pile of crumbs I’d brushed onto the floor and fifty cents in very small change.

Sighing, I got back in the car and continued driving. Without my wallet, I also didn’t have an ID, which I knew was required to get into the nonprofit’s building. Oh well—at least I wouldn’t have to worry about not making an impression on the CEO. When she got the call that she had a visitor who didn’t have any ID, I’d make an impression before I even set foot in her office. An impression I could drive home by asking if I could bum ten bucks off her for gas. Otherwise, I might not be getting home that night.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh. Of course, it’s more fun when you have someone to laugh with, so I called my wife. Mia knows all about my forgetfulness, and I figured she’d appreciate the situation.

I was right. We laughed out loud together. Then she let me in on a secret: knowing me so well, she’d stashed twenty dollars in my car for just such an occasion. I looked in the glove compartment and, sure enough, found a twenty-dollar bill hidden in there. I would be making it home that night.

After thanking her profusely, I drove the rest of the way to the meeting, where I experienced another stroke of luck. The CEO got out of her car at the same time as I did, so I was able to walk into the building with her and bypass the front desk, with no one any the wiser about my forgotten wallet.

That day, a little thing made the difference between appearing to be competent and appearing to be a guy who can’t remember to take his wallet with him when he leaves the house. (I’m actually both, but most executives might not understand that.) And that made the difference between getting the opportunity to work with an exciting nonprofit and potentially getting passed over.

People talk about big birthday surprises and breathtaking holiday gifts, but give me the little things in life. To me, it’s the everyday details that matter. The little things are the big things. When we realize this, we also realize that there are infinite ways to help others.

THE MENDERS

In March 2010, seventy-one-year-old Barb Lappen was newly retired and looking for a meaningful way to spend her time. When a guest speaker at her suburban Philadelphia church told stories of the work she did for Broad Street Ministry (BSM), a nonprofit dedicated to helping Philadelphia’s homeless, something clicked.

“I could have served food or something like that, but it didn’t engage me,” Barb says. “But I do know how to sew, and maybe they had things that needed to be sewn up and mended.”

When she pitched the idea to BSM staff members, they didn’t know if there was a need for mending but invited her to run the idea past the guests during lunch someday.

“As lunch was served, I would go to a table and say, ‘We’re thinking of starting a mending project here,’ and I got the most blank-looking faces. Finally someone said, ‘What is mending?’ I said, ‘It’s repairing your clothes.’ And this one guy had on a jacket and he pulled it open and he said, ‘You mean like this?’ The whole lining of the jacket was ripped, from the wrist down to the waist. I said, ‘That is exactly what we could mend for you.’ Another man said, ‘You mean like this?’ and he pulled a button out of his pocket with some thread hanging from it. I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

Just about everyone had something that needed to be mended, and thus the mending program got its start.

Barb didn’t waste any time recruiting other seamstresses, almost all of them fellow grandmothers. “Every woman I asked about this said yes. I didn’t have to beat the bushes. I thought that was God’s hand. I had the idea, but I think God was guiding all of us.”

With a crew of six menders in place, they turned their efforts to gathering the tools and materials they needed.

“People donated a lot of sewing stuff, but what we still needed were some good machines—ones that weren’t forty years old,” Barb says. “But we didn’t have any money. So we had a pity party, and then one woman opened her pocketbook, took out a twenty-dollar bill and put it on my coffee table. She said, ‘This is a start to a new machine.’ Every single woman followed her lead.”

When Barb’s church found out about the menders, members began donating money, and the church included the group in a Christmas fundraiser. Between that and the menders’ thriftiness—“We always save our coupons for JOANN!” Barb says—they soon had enough money for the sewing machines.

Over time, the group has grown to thirty menders. Five or six of them show up to work at BSM every Thursday, and a second crew shows up every week at Hub of Hope, another homeless engagement center in Philadelphia. In the morning, guests drop off items that need mending, and they usually get them back the same day.

“Homeless people have to wait for everything,” Barb says. “They aren’t used to being served, and so that is one of our guiding principles: to get that garment finished and back to the person in the same day. In the beginning, if they had pants that we shortened, I’d press them and put them over my arm like a valet and go out and find the person and say, ‘These are your pants. They’re all ready.’ They’d look at me like ‘What? They’re ready and they’re pressed and you’re bringing them out on your arm?’ ”

For people used to being treated as if they’re invisible, it’s no doubt a rare pleasure to come to BSM on mending day and be offered a seat where they can relax and talk to someone who cares. The fact that the menders can fix a favorite shirt, whip an outfit into shape for a job interview or reinforce all-important pockets and backpacks is the icing on the cake.

“We mend about twelve or thirteen items every Thursday,” Barb says. “And some things are more complicated than others. The backpacks come in there and you would just cry if you saw them, but we fix them. Everything they own is in their backpacks and their pockets, so pocket mending is a big deal, too.”

It may sound corny, but these menders really are mending hearts as well as clothes. They learn the names of their guests, offer hugs and reassuring pats on the back and—maybe in a way that only a grandmother can—remind the guests that they’re important. It’s no wonder that some of the guests leave with tears in their eyes.

As one homeless man said, “Everyone appreciates them. They are amazing, great seamstresses, and they care. It’s so nice to be recognized and treated like a person.”

Another guest came back two years after the menders had fixed his backpack to thank them. He wanted them to know that he was employed and off the streets and that he hadn’t forgotten what they’d done for him.

After ten years, the work inspires Barb as much as ever. “When we walk to the train at the end of the day to head home, we look at each other and say, ‘I’m really tired, but what a good tired it is.’ ”

NO MORE KNOTS

While Barb’s guests thrived on the fact that the menders didn’t treat them as if they were invisible, there are those who want to be invisible. Sometimes the smallest thing we can do to help them to achieve that is the biggest favor we can do for them.

Jimmy, a kid from Flint, Michigan, wanted more than anything to blend in. Every morning before school, his mom tied his shoes in a jumble of knots in hopes that they’d stay tied all day and he wouldn’t have to ask his teacher to retie them. Jimmy hated how conspicuous the big loopy knots were, but he really hated having his teacher retie them in front of everyone. Although tying shoes wasn’t a problem for any of the other third graders, Jimmy was different from them in a significant way: he had only one hand.

His teacher, Don Clarkson, never made him feel embarrassed about needing help, but for Jimmy, not being able to tie his own shoes was just one more reminder that he wasn’t like his classmates. As if the shiny metal prosthetic “hook” hand that he tried to hide in his pocket weren’t enough. It looked so foreign and threatening that it once even made one of his classmates cry.

One day when Jimmy got to school, Mr. Clarkson greeted him with a big smile. “I’ve got it! I figured it out!”

Jimmy had no idea what he was talking about.

“I know how you can tie your shoes,” he said.

After turning on the film projector to keep the rest of the class occupied, Mr. Clarkson dragged two chairs into the hallway, where he invited Jimmy to sit and taught him how to tie his shoes with just his left hand.

Whether it had taken Mr. Clarkson twenty minutes or all night to figure out, it had a profound effect on Jim Abbott’s life. “I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Jim says decades later, “but he had two hands. And I think of him at night . . . with a clenched fist and working with those laces and pulling them tight, and then coming that day and pulling me out of class and saying, ‘We can do this.’ ”

Jim says Don Clarkson’s gift was a turning point. It instilled a belief in him that he’d always be able to find a solution for whatever problems he faced. This attitude that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do would go on to fuel a stellar career. Jim won an Olympic gold medal as part of the American baseball team, played Major League Baseball, pitched a no-hitter, wrote a best-selling memoir and touched the lives of thousands of people through his inspirational talks and volunteerism.

When Jim had signed his first contract with the California Angels, he became an instant point of curiosity and inspiration for children who looked different from their friends. Suddenly, children who were born with visible congenital anomalies or had suffered permanent injuries had a hero and a role model.

The letters from children and their parents started arriving during spring training. “First, there were a couple letters at a time,” Jim says in his inspiring autobiography, Imperfect: An Improbable Life, “and Tim Mead (then director of media relations for the team) would bring them by my locker and we’d write back something supportive and personal.”

By the time the season started, a couple of letters a week had turned into dozens, and soon there would be hundreds. “I read every letter,” Jim writes, “and Tim and I answered every one because I knew these kids and I knew how far a little boy or girl could run with fifty words of reassurance.”

Before long, children with disabilities were showing up at every game. Jim was caught off guard.

“I didn’t expect the stories they told or the distance they traveled to tell them or the desperation revealed in them. They were shy and beautiful, and they were loud and funny, and they were, like me, somehow imperfectly built. And, like me, they had parents nearby, parents who willed themselves to believe that this accident of circumstance or nature was not a life sentence, and that the spirits inside these tiny bodies were greater than the sums of their hands and feet.”²

Jim played ten seasons, and whether he was playing well or not, he always took the time to talk to the kids and sometimes even show them how to tie their shoes with one hand. And for every kid he met, there were many others who saw him on TV.

One of the kids Jim inspired, Nick Newell, had been born without a left hand. He was six years old when he saw Jim on TV, and at that point Jim was the only other person Nick had seen who had only one hand. He got the chance to meet Jim when his grandparents took him to a Yankees meet-and-greet and Jim took the time to visit with them—and, in the process, provide Nick with some inspiration. If Jim could play for Nick’s favorite baseball team, Nick could pursue his dreams.

When Nick was older, he joined the school wrestling team. He lost his first seventeen matches, getting pinned every time, but he kept pushing. “I wasn’t good at it, and the competitor in me was not okay with that,” he says. “I had to keep working and become good at it. Over the summer, while other kids were playing around, I was training.”

The next year he had a winning record, and in his senior year he broke school and state records and made All-State. In college, he captained his team and also had the chance to train in mixed martial arts (MMA). He lost his first MMA fight, but he won the next thirteen.

Despite his success, though, Nick wasn’t allowed to compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the best-known and highest-paying league. “It’s hard to fight here with two arms,” UFC President Dana White said. “Fighting with one arm is just craziness to me.” But Nick didn’t let that stop him. Instead, he fought his way to a world championship in Xtreme Fighting Championships. Six years later, White would change his mind and give Nick a chance to earn a contract with UFC—if he could win a fight against undefeated fighter Alex Munoz. Unfortunately, Nick lost in a close match, but he’s still hoping to land a UFC contract.

“I just think of myself as a regular guy who wants to be the best he can be,” Nick says. “The amount of hands I have really makes no difference. I am a fighter who happens to have one hand, not a one-handed fighter. But it does make a difference to other people. There are people that get discouraged and look at me and say, ‘Hey, if this guy can do it, I can do it.’ ”

That’s how Nick had regarded Jim. “I looked at him when I was a kid and it helped me. I had never seen anyone else that only had one hand. Then all of a sudden I meet Jim, and he has one hand. I thought he was awesome, and he showed me that I could be what I wanted to be.”

And now Nick finds himself a role model. “I didn’t expect it, but all these people started coming out, and I always go out of my way to meet people who want to meet me. Jim met me. He showed me how to behave if you become a success. What makes me any better than anyone? I was just a kid who wanted to meet someone, and I met him and it changed me. Because of the impact he had on me, I’d like to do that for someone else.”

In addition to being a favorite in the World Series of Fighting, Nick meets kids with upper limb loss and their families at events run by the nonprofit Helping Hands and speaks at seminars across the United States. Like his role model, he continues to work with and inspire children, showing them by example that even the biggest dreams can be achieved.

And sometimes he even passes along Don Clarkson’s lesson and teaches them how to tie their shoes with one hand.

ANGEL FROM ANOTHER WORLD

When Jim talks about Don’s lesson, he begins, “I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” but no one knows better than he does how big a deal his teacher’s gesture was. If something doesn’t sound like a big deal, think again. Literally. Take a moment to consider that it might be a big deal after all—and to remember that we need to get past drop-in-the-bucket thinking if we’re going to see all the opportunities out there for what they are.

Those opportunities can be found at your school, your church or anywhere else in your community. They’re as close as your husband’s glove compartment (thanks, Mia) and as far away as another continent. Hilde Back found opportunity both in her backyard in Sweden and thousands of miles away in Africa, where a monthly act of kindness she performed transformed Chris Mburu’s life—and ultimately the lives of hundreds of others.

As a child in Kenya, surrounded by families earning barely enough to feed themselves, Chris was on a well-worn path. In his village, which lacked paved roads, electricity, running water and medical facilities, families couldn’t afford the fees required for secondary school. Instead of finishing school, most kids would wind up working in the fields, following in their parents’ footsteps and sometimes not even making enough money to survive.

“Not much hope for a future,” Chris says.

Meanwhile, more than four thousand miles and a world away in Sweden, Hilde Back knew firsthand what it was like to grow up without hope. As a Jewish teenager in Germany in the 1940s, she was trapped amid the horrors of the Holocaust—until a stranger gave her family money so that she and her parents could cross the Baltic Sea and join her brothers, who were already living in Sweden.

Because she was only seventeen, Hilde was admitted into the country while her parents were sent back to Germany, where they would die in separate concentration camps. In their absence, a family friend arranged for Hilde to become a nanny for a Swedish couple with a young child.

As an adult, Hilde became a preschool teacher and went on to help children and support her community. She gave what she could to charitable organizations such as Save the Children, and in the early 1970s when she learned of a Swedish nonprofit to support gifted and impoverished Kenyan children by paying their school fees, she signed on.

“I think it’s very important to care about people in other countries and other cultures,” Hilde said in an interview with The Jewish Chronicle. “I was helped once when I came to Sweden. And it affects you very much . . . . I think there’s so much need in the world that we need to help. It just felt normal to donate some money to a child.”

So every month, she sent a $15 gift to support a boy more than four thousand miles away. “It wasn’t much money,” she says in A Small Act, a documentary about the results of her act of kindness. “What you send is just a drop in the ocean, and sometimes you wonder whether it helps.” But her gift was enough to alter the path Chris was on. In fact, it was enough to change everything for the star student. By making it possible for Chris to attend high school, Hilde also made it possible for him to attend the University of Nairobi, which is free, and graduate from Harvard Law School on a Fulbright scholarship.

To those who knew her in Sweden, Hilde was a quiet schoolteacher. To Chris, she was “an angel who walked into my life and fixed it.” He said the $15 she sent every school term is what made him who he is. “Some stranger walked into my life and changed it,” he told Movies that Matter. “Hilde gave me hope. I kept coming back to the village and seeing these people that I went to school with who had not been able to continue with their studies, and I saw where they were in their lives. For them, the angel had not appeared.” Now, Chris is doing something about that. At age fifty-three, he’s an international human rights lawyer serving with the United Nations as a senior human rights adviser. He’s also the founder of a nonprofit that assists with education funding for Kenyan children living in poverty. In his spare time, he advocates for governments around the world to provide free education as a basic human right, and he raised awareness through events in more than a dozen countries last year. “I want to see a world in which children have equal opportunity and are not robbed of their future by poverty, like so many of my friends in the village were,” Chris said.

In A Small Act, he talks about having to tackle a big problem with the same kind of approach that Hilde did. “We would like to be able to support the education of every student, but we need to start small. You have to say, ‘I know that I cannot provide support, relief and help to all the suffering that is around here, but I want to do one thing. I want to take one action that will work towards relieving that situation.’ ”

At the time of the fund’s founding in 2001, Chris hadn’t met his benefactor, but he knew her name and called his nonprofit the Hilde Back Education Fund in her honor. He didn’t know if she was even alive, but he petitioned the Swedish embassy to find her, and after it shared her contact information with him, he reached out to her. They’ve since become close friends. In fact, Chris considers their relationship to be like that of a mother and son, and he makes a point of taking the long trip from home to visit her in Sweden at least once a year. One year he also accompanied her on a trip to his Kenyan village, where she was made an honorary tribal elder. She dressed in traditional Kikuyu clothes, and the village turned out for a ceremony in tribute to her. Hilde says she discovered a home she’d never known.

For Chris, meeting Hilde was an eye-opening experience. “I was not brought up in an environment where people just helped other people with whom they were not related,” he says in the documentary. “I thought that Hilde was a wealthy person who was just sort of shedding off some of her wealth by supporting needy kids. And then I discover later on that she was just an ordinary Swede who probably could have found better uses for that money but she decided to use it to support a kid.”

Today, Chris’s nonprofit is providing opportunities for families and their future children to escape poverty just as Hilde did for him. As of 2019, the Hilde Back Education Fund has made it possible for more than eight hundred Kenyan children to be educated.

Chris says many of the students and families give back. “I get notes like ‘I would like you to know that I’m so happy you helped my son, and now that we have some money, I’m sending you a little’ and ‘You helped me—now I will help three kids in your program.’ ” A group of alumni of the program have even started a club to help carry forward the organization’s mission. And just like Hilde’s kindness gave birth to the Hilde Back Education Fund, Chris’s nonprofit is starting to give birth to additional organizations. One graduate is starting a similar nonprofit in Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya, and Kathleen Hubbard-Ismail, an American inspired by Chris’s story, started the Ghana Scholarship Fund, which provides Ghanaian children in rural areas with educational opportunities.

“He’s such an example of how someone’s life can be transformed through education,” Kathleen says. “And I looked at Hilde and thought, ‘Heck, she’s not some rich woman. She’s just a person with a heart who wanted to try to make a difference.’ I had taken a service trip to Ghana and had seen the education problem there and decided I, too, could do something. I told myself to just do it and don’t be afraid. Never in a million years did I think I’d start a nonprofit company, let alone in Africa.” With limited resources, Kathleen has built a nonprofit that has provided 190 scholarships as well as computer labs to allow hundreds of kids in rural villages to use learning software to prepare for high school.

Chris couldn’t be happier that that’s the kind of influence he’s had. “Real philanthropists, in my view, do not have to wait to make millions to begin donating to a just cause,” he says. “It’s not about the size of the pocket. They can start at any time with small gestures towards the rest of humanity.”

EYESIGHT TO THE POOR

Sharing Hilde’s passion for giving back, my grandmother often donated modest amounts of money to charity. Nanny told us that it all mattered, and I loved that she was so thoughtful about choosing the best places for her $25 donations.

But donations weren’t all she provided. She also regularly shared her wisdom with family members. I’ll never forget the warm Tuesday night when I was the beneficiary of some of Nanny’s well-meaning health advice. As I often did that summer, I was participating in the Philadelphia Inline Skate Club’s weekly Rollerblade skate through the city, and we were about halfway through and on a drink break. I knew I had about ten minutes, and as I stood outside a convenience store drinking a Gatorade, I took advantage of that window to check in with Nanny, who was eighty-five at the time.

“Brad, I’m so happy you called,” she said. “I have some important information to share.” She paused. “I think your underwear is too tight. That’s why you’re having trouble having babies.”

What?!

Fortunately, I wasn’t drinking my Gatorade at that moment or I would have sprayed it all over the passersby. I didn’t know what to say. Finally, the best I could come up with was, “Thanks, I’ll wear looser underwear.”

Nanny was always helpful that way. She’d never gone to medical school or held a health-related job, but whenever it came to matters of health, she was eager to assist family members and strangers alike. Once, she even cured a case of blindness thousands of miles away in Ethiopia.

Congenital cataracts had left an eight-year-old girl named Nunu blind since she was a toddler. In many developing countries, communities don’t understand disabilities, so kids like Nunu are often stigmatized and miss out on play and school. To make matters worse, safety measures are often lacking, making it dangerous to walk in areas with cliffs and open fires. It’s also a burden on family members who have to sacrifice work and school time to be with the child who is disabled.

“I had to depend on my family to walk and move around,” Nunu says.³ “In most cases, I preferred staying at home the whole day. I had no chance to go out and play with friends. They would not let me play with them even if I wanted to, because of my blindness. Everyone laughed at me. I was not given a chance to go to school, because I am blind. No one bothered to help me. I used to cry every time I heard children talking about school, and I was always worried about what will happen to me in the future.”

Without the infrastructure in place to accommodate special needs, many blind children in countries like Ethiopia grow up in a world of isolation. And as adults, the blind can’t contribute to supporting a family and aren’t considered good prospects for marriage. All in all, it’s a bleak picture.

Fortunately for Nunu, her family didn’t give up hope. In response to an outreach campaign by the nonprofit Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP), she and her father traveled to the city of Harar in December 2016, where she and more than twelve hundred other people were offered hope in the form of free cataract surgery. The procedure takes about ten minutes, meaning a single doctor can perform dozens of surgeries a day. Put another way, a single doctor can transform dozens of lives a day.

When Nunu’s surgery was over, she spoke like someone who’d just stepped across the threshold into a new world.

“I couldn’t figure out what I was feeling at first. At the beginning, I was shocked because I never thought I would see again. Now I am the happiest girl in the entire world and I can’t wait to go back home and show all my friends that I can see just like they do. I know they would let me play with them this time. I also want to go to school. I am so excited.”

And where does Nanny fit into all this? With money she left me after she died, I donated $200 to HCP. Based on my calculations, HCP has brought the surgery’s total cost per patient to a maximum of $195 to operate on both eyes—compared with the more than $3,000 charged per eye for the procedure in the United States. And that’s $195 if HCP’s entire budget is spent on surgeries, but it isn’t. HCP also provides eye exams and basic eye care for nearly 1.7 million people and trains physicians who will provide life-changing eye surgeries, so the actual figure for curing a case of blindness is something less than $195.⁴

Chances are, Nanny’s money didn’t go to Nunu herself, but it was enough to cure someone like Nunu of blindness. For less than $100 per eye, HCP has restored vision to hundreds of thousands of people across Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Besides providing volunteer doctors and setting up temporary clinics in remote areas, the program trains local physicians and health care providers in the cataract-removal procedure, creating a structure that can be sustained long after HCP is gone.