Personal Narrative_The Giving Store

                  The weather was sweltering, and I was on a 30-year-old bus with 30 other people. The air conditioning was broken, the seat cushions were worn off, and the whole bus smelled of dried sweat. The bus had been running on a straight road cutting through a vast field of reeds for the last 20 minutes, and there was nothing to be seen except the blue sky, the yellow reeds and the single line of gray asphalt ahead of us. All of us were exhausted from the bumpy, uncomfortable 4-hour bus trip, and desperately needed some rest. And that was when the bus engine broke down.

                  We were in Uganda, a country in East Africa, as a volunteer group to give people some medical help. Most of us were doctors, my mom a pharmacist, and others, including me, middle and high school students. The bus trip was from Entebbe International Airport to a city called Kumi, where we would be working for the next two weeks or so. When the engine broke down, we had just gotten out of a big city called Mbale, and were heading north. Since there was nobody around, the bus driver started attempting to fix the engine himself. He told us that he had done it a number of times before, so there wouldn’t be any problem fixing it again. However, he couldn’t be sure how long it would take.

                  So we were there, standing in the middle of nowhere, wondering what to do. We had no clue where we were, nor did we know when we could hit the road again. The sun was brightly shining on us, making us sweat even more. We couldn’t just stand there. So we decided to take a walk. It was a silent agreement. One of the doctors simply started walking slowly in the direction we were going, and the rest of us fell in behind him. Most of us seemed to be angry and confused. So we were all quiet until…

                  “Look, there’s a store!”

"OH.MY.GOD. IT'S A STORE!"

                  Everyone’s face shined with delight. There was a single-story building, standing not far from us, with a small sign that said “SHOP.” Finally we could take some rest in a shadow, maybe have some drinks, and possibly use a working air conditioner—although it wasn’t that probable for such a lone store. But anyway, we could get out of the sun, and that was the important thing. We all sped up, and when we arrived we were delighted to see the store open. A young woman, maybe in her late twenties, walked outside with four children and identified herself as the owner. We exchanged greetings and sat down in the shadow with her consent. Then, we naturally came to have a conversation with her. Her life story was heartbreaking. She had had a husband, not officially married but someone she loved. They had four children, and it all seemed to be going well until her husband just simply left her one day to marry another woman. After that, she had to raise her four children by herself, so she started running the store. But it was obvious to us that it hadn’t been going well for them. She and her children were wearing dirty ragged clothes, and were all so slim; one of the children even had a swollen stomach—a typical sign of malnutrition.

Ugandans drink a lot of soda...

                  Since we were so thirsty and actually felt sorry for them to be just sitting there talking, we decided to buy a box of Coke. But the owner went in and brought out two boxes of Coke, grinning widely. We were confused. Maybe she got us wrong. We explained to her that we only needed one box. But that wasn’t her intention. She told us to take both. Maybe we would get thirsty during the trip ahead of us; if not, we could just keep it and drink them later. Well, we couldn’t just take two for the price of one, could we? So we tried to pay for two boxes, but she declined positively.

                  I was watching this from the side, and I could see that she truly wanted to help us, when, from an objective view, it actually should’ve been us helping her. To her, we could have been just a bunch of worn-out strangers with weird skin colors who came to her store and just sat there talking for the last 15 minutes. She could have been disappointed, or maybe even angry, of us not buying anything. But she wasn’t. She had been beaming throughout the whole thing, showing her white teeth in contrast with her brown skin, and was now giving us bottles of Coke free of charge, happy to be helping someone else.

                  Just then, our bus driver called out to tell us that the engine was fixed and we were ready to leave. So we had to say rather an abrupt farewell to the store owner and her children. I didn’t see how the Coke-for-free problem was settled in the end, but assuming from the fact that none of us brought any extra bottles of Coke on the bus, we probably didn’t take the second box.

                  Then we left the site, leaving the store behind.

                  It was a short encounter, probably only for 30 minutes or so. But that little incident made me think a lot on my way to our destination. From what I had experienced in my previous trips, this kind of benevolent behavior wasn’t limited only to the store owner, but to most people in Uganda. Although many of them suffer from poverty and live hard lives, whenever they saw us, they waved their hands at us, grinned at us, and tried to help us from what they had. I was worn out from the bus trips and hard work, but seeing people live this way let me feel happiness and warmth in them that I don’t often find in people from our competitive society. This is why I like Uganda, and this is why I want to go there again.