An inspiring letter - Please read

This morning I was going through my email and I couldn’t find what I was looking for so I checked out my junk mail and I found this letter by accident. When I read it I was stunned and couldn’t imagine this being real. This woman’s kindness shocked me to the core.

For years she’d been helping save lives by donating blood, giving other people a chance to have warm, clean clothes and she didn’t think that she was doing much. To the people that she helped, she is an angel and to me, she is an inspiration.

Thank you, Natasha 🙂

Your book “Playing for Keeps” has been on my to-read list for ages and early last week i finally got around to it. It took me just a few hours to finish and I so enjoyed it that I decided I had to read your other stuff. So I came to your website and of course the first thing I saw was your June 6th post about wanting to encourage your readers to do a charitable act.

I’ve been donating blood several times a year since I was 18 (I’m 25 now) and I’m fortunate enough to have been born into the sort of lifestyle where clothes don’t last long in my closet and I usually give a bunch of clothes away at least once a year. Not to say these are small things to do for others because I know every little bit helps but reading your post I realized that those small things don’t really require me to go out of my way to help others. Reading your post and thinking about the fact that you are willing to give a book that you no doubt worked hard on for free in return for others’ acts of kindness inspired me to try and do better.

I recently graduated from law school from the 2nd most highly ranked university in Africa. the fees at my university and every school I went to before were very high especially when you consider the amount of poverty on this continent but I was lucky enough to finish school without ever having to take out a student loan or ever have to worry about how I was going to pay my tuition or any of my other expenses. When I graduated my parents, after giving me several huge graduation presents, told me that i could ask for one more thing to celebrate my graduation, anything i wanted-no limits.
For almost 2 months I’ve been been trying to decide what I wanted, what would be the best way for me to benefit from that opportunity. Reading your post made me realize that while I lacked for nothing and was actually having difficulty thinking of anything that I wanted that I already didn’t have there were so many people who are just hoping that someone who will do something small like giving away some old clothes. at first I felt very ashamed and then I felt inspired.

There are so many young people in Africa who are so smart but will never be able to realize their full potential because they can’t afford to get an education. So yesterday I went to my parents and I told them that what I wanted for my graduation present was for them to start a scholarship fund to help high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds get a college education that they would not have afforded otherwise.

So the long and short of it really is that I just wanted you to know that your act of kindness inspired me to perform my own act of kindness and as a result, in a roundabout way, you are probably going to be responsible for the education of someone, or several someones, and that you probably changed someone’s life.

So, thank you.

Natasha