She found me, this stranger, doubled over on the sidewalk, gasping for breath. I’m a woman who runs, and I’d run too far, too fast.

“You need some sugar,” the stranger said, partly as a question, more as an answer. I nodded, looked up. The stranger had bright white hair cropped close to her head and thick brown brows painted in perfect arches too far above her eyes.

I took the orange sparkle sweet she handed me, smiled, and she left.

It’s not the first time I’ve been touched by the kindness of strangers. It normally happens at times when I’m at my most vulnerable, when I’ve just arrived somewhere, or I’ve nearly left.

The orange sparkle stranger caught me at a beginning. I’d just said goodbye to Shanghai at the tail end of the Water Snake Year, twelve months and ten days since moving there. I’m back now in South Africa, poised between oceans and mountains, steadying myself for the Wooden Horse Year, and everything else that comes with a poorly planned adventure.

In China I learnt that this sort of random kindness transcends language and culture and all other things that make a place seem strange. Somewhere in Guizhou province, while running the only marathon I’ve run yet, a young boy threw me his tangerine. I’d just passed the kilometre thirty-seven mark and the second empty water station in a row. I wasn’t sure I would make it, and I suppose he knew. I didn’t even peel the fruit. I just tore it apart with my teeth. When I reached the finish line, there were pieces of pith still stuck to my cheek.

But orange isn’t the only colour of kindness. On my first day back in Cape Town, I attempted a journey across the city to meet up with old friends. The first bus driver wanted to take us, but we didn’t have the required red travel card and, apologising, he had to let us go. I think he was more sorry than we were.

We crowded instead into a combi taxi—the sort that speed from point to point picking up passengers and parcels as they go, where all the rules are unwritten and I just watched the person sitting beside me to find out what I needed to know. At the terminus, we waited nearly an hour for a connection, our phone batteries and patience running low. After declining, for the fifth time, attempts to sell us Superglue and Nik Nak chips, I surrendered my place on the stainless steel bench and joined the quicker queue to buy train tickets instead.

Arriving at our destination railway station, I could finally phone a friend. My clothes were crinkled, my hair stuck to my forehead, and my shoulders, sheltered from sunlight in Shanghai, were already turning red. I remember thinking the glass of white wine that the stranger handed me looked more green, or yellow, than the label probably said. He’d emerged from his restaurant opposite, balancing three generous glasses on a tray. He told us he wouldn’t take no for an answer, that there was nothing we could say. So we waited on the platform, quaffing colourful wine with our stranger and soon recovered the remains of that day.

Sometimes the kindness of strangers is seen in simple gestures, like all those people who’ve helped me lug backpacks or suitcases up broken-down escalators on London’s underground whenever I return home, or the old man in blue workers’ overalls who swept the contents of my split grocery bag from a street in Shanghai, loaded everything into his rickety bicycle basket, and pushed it nine blocks out of his way. He chatted the whole way to me in Mandarin, or maybe Shanghainese, not minding that I understood nothing and could only tell him “My favourite food is the big green vegetable.” He merely minded when I tried to hand him a tip for his kindness as we parted ways at my front door.

I know I’m not the only person to benefit from the kindness of strangers. It’s one of the things that connect us all. So while I’m unsure about what the Year of the Horse may bring, it’s my intention to gallop into it armed with my own brand of orange sparkle sweets, to sometimes be that stranger that makes things a little easier.

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Editorial Assistant: Pamela Mooman/Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: elephant journal archives