A birthday that Quetta will never forget!
The look on the waiter’s face, when we gave him the tips we had collected for him was priceless.
July 5, 2013, marked my 24th birthday and I decided to spend the day doing something different. Inspired by a video I found online, I decided that I would spend the day doing random acts of kindness. So my friends and I spent the entire day looking for ways to be helpful to society. We went to the hospital, to our university and finally took to the streets to do something constructive with the time we had.
It was during this day that I realised what a beautiful city my dear Quetta is. The satisfaction I got from just doing simple things is incomparable. Little things like playing with the kids in the streets, giving them candy and sports equipment lit up their little faces enough to brighten up my entire day!
I came across four children who belonged to a Sindhi family and were playing cricket with a makeshift- bat (a wooden plank). My friends and I chatted with them, played cricket with them and at the end donated our bat and ball to them. We didn’t spend time with these kids because we felt like we needed to - we wanted to and we had fun doing it too.
We also decided to go to a local restaurant and see how we could help out there. Here, we volunteered as waiters and waited on tables for customers. The look on the waiter’s face, when we gave him the tips we had collected for him was priceless.
The expressions and gratitude of these people, for some time, made me forget that bad people even exist in this world. Every person out on the street was so pleasant and deserving of our attention that it was hard to imagine any bad out there.
The look in their eyes revealed everything to me; the respect, gratitude and joy they felt all with just the little things I had done for them. Whether it was the traffic police officers on the road or the person receiving my blood donation, all of their eyes sparkled with such appreciation that I felt hopeful even in the bloodiest time our city has ever seen.
Before I set out on my mission, I didn't think that any of my deeds would affect me personally - I knew my efforts would help the others, but I didn’t think they would help me too.
On that day, however, I discovered that our society is full of unlimited opportunities to which we can contribute. In a city that bleeds daily, people need to change their mindsets. Instead of cursing the government officials and each other, we can act individually in order to make our society a better place to live in. I have realised that small gestures do make a lot of difference and my video proves just that!
Make people realise what good can be done and how you can change your own life and someone else’s starting with the smallest of things.
I can safely say, if I were given a choice to change how I celebrated my birthday, I wouldn’t change a thing. I would do it all over again! It was most definitely the best day of my life and the one day of my life that actually counted.
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Note: I would like to give camera and video credits to Rashid Ali Khosa.
Apart from that I would also like to thank my best friend, Muhammad Ulusyar Khan, who has always been there to support me. I would also like to thank Murtaza Jaffar and Khalid Ismail who gave me some wonderful ideas for the video and were there with me throughout the day.
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