Stories of Kindness from Around the World

Some months ago, my husband and I had tried tagging some military personnel and it had not materialized. Imagine our surprise when we landed at the same airport last month and noticed that there were military personnel waiting around in order to be shipped to some frontier. We literally rubbed our hands with glee and decided to tag them - and hopefully manage to complete it. Here is the story of the two tags - and both the tags (irrespective of the end result) left a great impact on us.

Tag 1 (6  months ago):

It was the end of our vacation and while we were waiting at the airport for our flight home, we noticed that there were a lot of military personnel waiting to be shipped out.  We had a thought - why don't we tag them with all with a beverage of their choice before they boarded their special flight.

So we went to the McDonald's in the airport and approached the manager. He was a young man and was initially a little puzzled that we wanted to tag the soldiers anonymously with a free drink. He was, however, sporting enough to want to help with the tag. Checking with the airline, we figured that there were about 127 soldiers in the airport, and we handed the manager about Rs. 3,500/-in cash to pay for a beverage for each of the soldiers.We asked the McDonalds manager to approach the carrier and make a PSA to the soldiers to step to their counter for a free drink - as a thank you from the country's grateful  citizens.

The manager approached the airline who refused to make the PSA as they could not understand why we wanted to do it. So the manager told us that he will go ahead and inform a couple of the army people waiting in the lounge and ask them to pass on the message to other army personnel in the lounge. So we walked back to where we had left our luggage, feeling a sense of warm glow.

Just our luck - the airline decided to make an announcement that the army personnel should board their flight immediately. And it was with a sense of disappointment that we watched them leave.   We were disappointed that none of the army people had been tagged as the announcement came immediately after the manager had approached the first army person. However the manager said that he felt very warm and touched to see such a gesture, and gave us a free ice-cream (his way of paying-it-forward) ;)

Tag 2 (Fast forward to last month)

At the end of another trip, we landed in the same airport to take our return flight home. And voila! The karma of RAK had sent a whole contingent of army people who were waiting in the airport for their flight. So we immediately went to the nearby snack shop where they sold pre-packaged snacks and sweets, explained the Smile Card concept to the manager there, and requested for his help.

He caught on to the idea at once, and asked one of his colleagues to select the snack items that could be used for the tag. While his colleague prepared the snack bags, we paid for 25 snack bags. We then asked him and his colleague to go around the airport offering a snack bag to each of the personnel stating that it was a thank you from all the citizens. We did not wait to see how the tag went, but I do hope it brought about a smile in a couple of hearts :)