The power of small acts of kindness

Kindness is one of the simplest expressions of humanity. It has the power to heal wounds that are not always visible. Its strength lies in its simplicity. It asks for no grand gestures, only the willingness to understand, care and make a difference in another person's life. Sometimes, the smallest act of kindness can become the beginning of someone's healing. Observed every year on November 13, World Kindness Day celebrates the power of compassion and the importance of small gestures in bringing people together.

The notebook

A 58-year-old pharmacist in Sarba, who preferred to remain anonymous, has been working for thirty-one years. Behind her counter sits a school exercise book with a blue cover. She does not like to talk about it.

“When the crisis began, the medicine prices doubled, then tripled,” she told The Beiruter. “A woman came in for her husband’s heart pills and counted her money. I knew she did not have enough. I said, ‘Take them, pay me when you can.’ That was the first name I wrote in the book.”

There are now hundreds of names. Some have been crossed out in pencil, paid back in bills, in simple gestures. Many have not been paid at all.

“My family thinks I am mad,” she laughed. “My husband worries. But I think about that woman, counting her cash. If I had turned her away, I would have carried her face for the rest of my life.”

Last spring, a man in his forties walked in and placed an envelope on the counter. “He told me, ‘My mother is in your book. She died in 2021. I only found the notebook she kept of her debts last month.’” She described. “He paid for her, and for three strangers on the same page. I have not stopped thinking about it.”

The stranger with the car

Joseph Geagea, 29, remembered August 4, 2020, in fragments: the sound that was not a sound, the glass, the blood running into his eye, the strangeness of walking through a street he no longer recognized.

“I could not find my phone. I could not find my shoes,” he recalled. “I was standing in the road with my hands shaking, and a car stopped. A man in his sixties, grey moustache, a rosary swinging from the mirror. He did not ask my name. He opened the back door, laid a towel on the seat so I would not worry about the blood, and drove me through the debris to the hospital.”

The man stayed in the waiting room for two hours. When a nurse finally called Joseph’s name, he was gone.

“I never learned his name. I looked for him for months. I even posted online: grey moustache, rosary, white Kia. Nothing.” Joseph told The Beiruter. “And I realized I was not looking for him to say thank you. I wanted to tell him that his towel on the seat was the moment I started to believe in people again.”

Today whenever Joseph sees someone stranded on the roadside, he pulls over. “It is the only way I know to pay him back. I just pass it to someone else, and hope it keeps travelling.”

The two rooms

Layal Chbat, 41, teaches Arabic at a school in Ain Ebel. Her home has two rooms, a narrow kitchen and a balcony where she grows basil in paint tins.

In autumn 2024, when the bombs fell in the south, a family of five arrived at her door, a mother, and three children. Layal knew none of them. A colleague had mentioned they were sleeping in a parked car.

“I did not decide anything,” she told The Beiruter. “I opened the door. The mother kissed my hands, and I did not know where to look. Then I looked at the youngest child, a boy of six, who was holding a plastic bag with his entire life inside it. One toy car and some socks.”

They stayed for two months.

“Kindness is not always pretty. Sometimes you resent it. At two in the morning, I lay awake and asked myself, what have I done? But then the boy would crawl into the kitchen in the morning and say, ‘Teacher, can I help with the bread?’ And I would forget everything I had been counting.”

When they finally returned to their home, the mother left her a small, embroidered cloth. It hangs on the wall above the basil.

Kindness will not repair the economy or rebuild a port. It simply allows us to keep looking at each other, even when we are tired.