My Grand Adventure

I did it! This is how it went:

This was our shbeal: "Hi, I'm Gloria" "And I'm Michelle" "We're doing random acts of kindness today and we wondered if there was anything we could do for you! Housework, weeding...?"

We alternated taking turns speaking. It was my friend's idea to stick in the "random acts of kindness" part because that's a little more acceptable to people then "we're trying to show love to you".

At first we received a slew of rejections. Weirdly enough, a lot of people were like, "Actually, I JUST finished ALL my housecleaning now." Really? Sunday is cleaning day? Who knew!

A few people were nice but politely told us they couldn't think of anything for us to do. I suppose I understand. I don't know how I would react if someone had come to my apartment door asking me if she could do some housework for me.

One lady looked at us horrified, abruptly said, "No!" and closed the door on us. Then about 5 seconds later she opened the door again and told her little girl who was playing with the other kids to come inside. She came at the end of about 15 rejections, so even though I wasn't expecting people in general to be anything but weirded out, I was still a bit disheartened.

We went to a few more doors and were rejected a few more times.

Then we saw one Chinese lady out on her front lawn holding her baby. My friend said, "Let's go to her!" So we did. She couldn't think of anything, just like everyone else, but she asked if we were students, what we were doing this summer, where we lived, why we were doing this, etc. She then said, "Well, I can't think of anything today but I have been looking for a tutor to teach me English." Eager for SOMETHING, I said, "Okay!" She invited us in. So we came in and she chopped us up some watermelon and we talked with her for the next half hour or so! It turns out she has a phD and she's a professor at the university teaching some sort of business course. She doesn't know much about Canadian culture and especially wants to know about the culture of Canadian students! So, we arranged that every Sunday I would come for an hour and teach her about Canadian culture among young people!

AND She figured out I was a Christian from what I'm studying next year and asked what church I go to. It turns out, she's not a Christian, (she explained that most Chinese are atheists) but she's looking for a local church to visit! She said she wanted me to teach her about Christianity and that she was "open to it!" Whoah. I was NOT seeking to do that but that's SO cool!

So that was ABSOLUTELY LOVELY!

Eventually, we headed out and knocked on more doors. We had a lot more trouble with people actually answering their doors this time and we wondered if word of us got around and people just didn't want to deal with these two weirdos. Then we figured out that maybe we were starting to enter an area of the neighbourhood most occupied by absentee students, because a lot of the mailboxes were jam packed with mail.

Then we knocked on our final door. A girl about my age answered, we did our shbeal, and she couldn't think of anything at first. My friend suggested weeding. She nonchalantly was like, "Sure." We got a plastic bag from her and ecstatically started weeding - FINALLY! A job to do! The residents of the house didn't interact with us at all. At one point though, we filled the bag so I knocked on the door for another one. Some other guy answered the door and I was like, "Hi, we filled up our first bag, can we have another one?" He was like, "uhh... why are you weeding our lawn?" I explained that we were doing a random act of kindness. Apparently the first girl didn't tell anyone about us. Confused, he got us another bag and said, "uhh... thanks for doing that, eh?" That made me feel good. When he left the house a few minutes later he didn't even look at us though. I guess they didn't know what to do with these two randomers who wanted to do their weeding for them! Oh well.

So all in all it was quite an adventure. I would say that despite the many, many rejections, it was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon and I would totally do it again.

Yay for experiments!