Every December, my church fills about 2,000 cardboard boxes with turkeys, brussels sprouts, Quality Street and all the other edibles that make up Christmas. We personally deliver these hampers to local people who find it hard to make ends meet at Christmas. When I was a teenager, I gladly went knocking on strangers’ doors to deliver the red and gold boxes, but in my 20s I developed a new cynicism. I dutifully donated the £25 it cost to make up a hamper, but I balked at handing out the boxes in person. It felt too much like playing lady bountiful.
Coming from an African context, charity can feel like a dirty word – synonymous with power and its abuse, with the pride of the benefactor and the belittling, even exploitation, of the recipient. Yet there is also an older meaning of charity, from the Latin caritas, a root of the word that is more synonymous with love. So one December, hearing we were short of volunteers, I decided to sign up and rediscover the meaning of caritas. Delivery day arrived, the Saturday before Christmas, and it was snowing as it never does in December. Surely it was a sign from the heavens that I should roll over in bed and pull my duvet over my head.
I got to church certain the event would be cancelled, or at least subcontracted to professionals trained to carry heavy loads in the snow. No such luck. Most of the volunteers had shown up, the boxes were stacked in the vans, and we were ready to go. My group was sent to a council estate. Our instructions were simple. Knock. Smile. Explain. Deliver.
As some families had specifically asked for the hampers or received them in previous years, they didn’t need an explanation. Yet even families that were expecting us and were ready with mugs of tea still asked us why. Why did we wake up on a Saturday morning to hand out turkeys? And why, especially, did we do this in the snow? An attempt at love, we answered. A caritas that crossed race, religion, gender and every conceivable boundary.
We delivered to a vegetarian family who wanted everything but the turkey. We delivered to Muslim, Sikh and atheist families. I delivered to a man who thought I was selling the hamper, and insisted that he didn’t want to pay for the whole box, just the shortbread. We delivered to pensioners. We didn’t all believe the same things, or share the same views, but nevertheless we had connected over a box of food. There were tears and hugs and enough warm, fuzzy feelings to melt a little more off the polar ice caps.
At the end of the day I felt cold, but I also felt good. Too good, I thought. What exactly had we achieved? Two thousand households would have a nice Christmas lunch. So what? Had we fixed the structural inequalities that meant that more and more families each year were phoning the church because they could not afford a Christmas lunch? And if they couldn’t afford Christmas lunch, what of new year, and birthdays and anniversaries and all the other celebrations I took for granted? Where were the hampers for then?
Yet this cold, statistical assessment of the day did not fit my experience of it. From a lofty, dispassionate height, it is easy to dismiss individual acts of kindness because they appear to change little in the grand scheme of things. But I had knocked on doors, and held hands, and smiled and seen how important it was for people to know they were remembered. I had seen how important it was to know that, even between strangers, there could be love.
Can individual acts of kindness change anything? Surely the inequalities and injustices of this world are as fixed as the points of latitude. The hungry will always be hungry. The poor will always get poorer and the rich will always get richer. That is the way of the world.
Yet every unjust system is built on a million acts of unkindness that solidify into the norm. Habitual unkindness hardens into the shrug that says: “Oh that’s how we’ve always done things.” In Nigeria, politicians have always stolen money. In Switzerland, bankers have always stashed their loot. In the UK, some CEOs have never seen fit to pay the right tax. In my neighbourhood, we always walk past each other without a smile. On the underground, there will always be people crying and there will always be people walking past.
It is the aggregate of individual unkindness that has undone the world; it is the accretion of kindness that will change it. Small acts of love, replicated and duplicated and permutated, move the seemingly unmovable. Grain by grain, a different world is built.
Chibundu Onuzo is author of The Spider King’s Daughter
