When Mevan Babbakar, now aged 29, was a little girl she lived with her family in a refugee camp near the city of Zwolle in the Netherlands. The family, who are ethnic Kurds, had fled Iraq during the first Gulf War, had spent time in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Russia, and had very little money.
Yesterday, Babbakar sent out a tweet with an old photo in an attempt to find the name of an odd-job worker at the Zwolle camp whose name she had never known. She tweeted that the man:
out of the kindness of his own heart bought me a bike. My five year old heart exploded with joy.
It was a “beautiful, red, shiny bike”, according to Babbakar’s mother, as reported by Amy Walker in the Guardian. When asked what she’d do if she found the man, Babbakar responded:
Honestly I’d cry my eyes out. There was so much hardship at that point in our lives and this was such a generous act, it taught me kindness can exist everywhere, no matter how terrible it may seem.
Twitter can be remarkably effective for this. In a very short time, Twitter correspondents found the man for her, and the BBC reports that today she was reunited with her benefactor Egbert, who now lives in Germany and who, she says:
thought the bike was too small a gesture to make such a big fuss about but he's really glad that it was the key to bringing us together again…. Small actions can have big consequences. The kindness that Egbert and his family showed me will stay with me for a lifetime, and it continues to shape me as a person.
If this inspires you to do something similar for a refugee child in a US camp, forget it: Trump and his fellow Republicans won’t let you. According to Julissa Arce writing in TIME, the US Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection prohibit donations to children in US custody in detention camps. The kindness that Egbert demonstrated in the Netherlands is verboten in the US.