Few things in life are free….

…but one of them is the smile. After two days of standing on sidewalks fundraising, I have probably given away well over 1,000 smiles. And I have probably meant at least 950 of them. Almost every single person who walks by me gets a “How are you today?”, eye contact, and a smile. And lots of them smile back. Because giving a complete stranger a smile makes them feel good. I know that because lots of them smile back - genuine smiles - and that makes me feel good. It’s a little thing that wards off the pessimism about humanity that is easy to creep up on you after a day fundraising in the streets.

Because when you ask somebody on the street to give you money in return for nothing, you have no way of knowing their response. You are invading their world uninvited and asking them to join you in yours for a split second. Standing on a sidewalk, you have 10 seconds at most to catch their eye, their attention, and get them to slow down. And an average of 30 seconds to get them to understand something that you believe in enough to spend a year and a half out of your life pursuing. While there are definitely a lot of encouraging, uplifting responses, there is also a handful per day of jaw-dropping, often angry responses that leave you speechless. And for some reason that anger has a tendency to stick more than the encouragement.

At the end of the day, fundraising is in many ways a fancy word for hustling. Whether I like it or not, in order for me to get to Africa to do the work that I want to do, I have to meet a certain monetary goal. And in order to meet that goal I have to meet a daily goal on fundraising trips. An inordinate amount of time is spent trying to find the best locations, determining the best strategies, and trying to suss out through a person’s body language, their eye contact, anything, who you should ask and how you should ask it. And yet at the same time there is absolutely no way to tell who at the end of it all will give you money and who will not; I have learned that often the most unlikely looking people are the most generous.

And so, regardless of who gives and who does not, I look each person who passes in the eye – rich, homeless, teenager or pensioner – and smile. And so today’s lesson: if you ever happen to pass someone on the street with a can in their hand and a good cause to talk to you about, whether you decide to give any money or not (and I recommend that you give!), look that person in the eye and give them a smile – after all, it’s free.