Dear A,
In 2002, I was a resident in Emergency Medicine finishing up my training at XXXX. I’d arranged through one of our part-time faculty to rotate through the Nairobi Hospital for about 6 weeks. When my sister mentioned to a friend that I was heading to Nairobi, her friend noted that her older brother’s good friend was working there as a teacher.
At that time in life, I was not particularly open to serendipity, but not wanting to hurt my sister’s feelings, I accepted contact information for my sister’s friend’s brother’s friend in Nairobi - a connection that sounded thin and preposterous when you said it aloud.
To digress for a moment: After graduating college, a childhood friend and I had planned to backpack Europe on the cheap together. I was an adventurer, and he was a risk minimizer. He bailed out a month beforehand, so I resolved to go solo. With an airline ticket bought with frequent flier miles from a generous uncle and a Eurail pass that was a gift from my parents, I flew out to Poland and worked my way west. It was the first time I’d ever traveled on my own, and I put a lot of time into planning and reading guidebooks. Because I knew where I wanted to go and how I planned to get there, I was more organized than 90% of my peers, and that meant others from the hostel scene were always asking to accompany me - it was sometimes lonely but I was never alone.
I figured Nairobi would be similar. I was wrong. The doc I worked with was very kind, but not of my generation, and he was busy. The residents I worked with in the ED had schedules as erratic as mine was at home, so they seldom had time to hang out together outside of the hospital. I was provided very comfortable guest housing in the hospital compound, but without roommates or neighbors. Walking wasn’t going to get me to the sights safely, and matatus (collective minibuses that provide public transportation) intimidated and confused me. Other than the program secretary, Mary (whom you met once when the three of us went out to coffee) and the security guard who asked me daily if I could get him a scholarship to study in the US, it turned out to be an isolating experience. So I reached out to my sister’s friend’s brother’s friend in Nairobi.
You were warm and generous with your time and friendship from the start. You invited me to join you and another visitor to town for a drive through Nairobi National Park in your car - an extremely memorable introduction to the area. Another day, we had a light roast coffee at an upscale coffee house in Nairobi.
You invited me to a faculty party at the international school where you taught, full of fascinating people who had decided to explore the world via their professional educational careers. I even connected with a fellow birdwatcher who taught at your school and who later invited me to sightsee Lake Nakuru with her.
That experience with you made me much more open to fully availing myself of any introduction, no matter how farfetched, in future adventures. Some of the best results from reaching out to loose connections would find me housing, friends and community time and again.
It gave me no small measure of joy as I looked you up online to discover that you’ve achieved great things in your career so far. I hope this finds your family thriving and you in a good place now that we both have more years behind us than ahead of us.
Back to the purpose of this letter: Yours was a kindness and companionship offered at a time when it was sorely needed and deeply appreciated. You reinforced the idea that vulnerability and kindness beget more of the same, themes that have been central to some of life’s best experiences to date.
So please accept my belated gratitude, and should you ever find yourself in the LA area, I’d love to invite you to a meal to catch up and hear how the rest of your story is going.
Warmly,
CD