Extreme Kindness

Chris's Journal - October 20, 2002

On the road again

Sunday we were invited to spend dinner with the ceo OF Columbia canada, doug, along with his wife betsy, son ron and two golden retrievers Betsy was the catalyst for our sponsorship with Columbia- after hearing about the extreme kindness tour on cbc’s basic black, she immediately informed doug of our tour. The grassroots nature of the tour, coupled with our mission of youth empowerment and desire for adventure made the extreme kindness tour a perfect fit for Columbia sponsorship. The twelve of us ( 7 crew, 3 family, and 2 dogs) feasted on a Chinese dinner for twenty. We gorged ourselves for a few hours, and them crawled into the motorhome, and rushed for the 402 to sarnia.

It took seven months of correspondence over the phone and on the internet to finally bring our crew to sarnia. In every major interview over the past year we have boasted about the Ontarian community of sarnia that invited us to commit random acts of kindness in their city. rod brown (sarnian councilmen, volunteer, lawyer and Rotarian) greeted us as we arrived in the banana-belt of Canada. Sarnia’s mild climate made us feel like we were in victoria’s sister city, minus the soothing scent of the pacific.

Rod is An exemplar OF COMPASION And how to embrace random acts of kindness. we were all overwhelmed by hi s generosity (which included a three night stay at the holiday inn, 300 flowers to dispense to the locals-thanks to Tanya!-and tickets to the see the polka king of Canada) and event planning expertise (he organized our entire stay in sarnia, and devoted a great deal of his time to supporting our outings). Our schedule is chok0-block full for the three days we are here. we kicked off today with a visit to the local council meeting- where we massaged the mayor and challenged the community to make random acts of kindness a priority everyday. We’ll be visiting numerous schools, speaking at rotary meetings, making a trip to the border to greet tourists coming to Canada, and of course performing our own bizarre on-the-street kind acts.

Our challenge to you: forward the website address, along with your best suggestion for a random act of kindness to someone from outside of north America, or bake a dozen cookie and give them out at work, school or on-the-street (don’t forget the chocolate chip happy face!).