Making a difference: Self Directed is Best Directed?

I live in Victoria on Vancouver Island.  It is a retirement destination for the rest of Canada - so much so that it has earned the title, "Home of the Newly Wed and the Nearly Dead".  Actually that title is no longer accurate.   With house prices the way they are, the only people who can afford to buy in Victoria, are retirees selling up from Toronto or Vancouver.  Nowadays, when the lights go up at the intermission of a play, all you see is a Sea of Silver hair.

It is only human for people to gravitate towards the Aristocracy of Youth.  The young are excited, attractive and vibrant.  However, making lemonade out of lemons, I am attempting to become a "Silver Miner".  In the process, I have come to appreciate one of the paradoxes of aging - those with the most remarkable stories to tell, often appear unremarkable.  I have come to appreciate that beauty is in fact, more than skin deep.

Breakfasting today at Madame Cuc's, I bumped into Bill and Dorothy from Burnie, Tasmania:

Bill retired from working as a paramedic at 50 in order to work for Dorothy in two successive, successful, businesses: first a hotel then a restaurant.  To be still so devoted after 51 years of marriage, is enough of an achievement.  But what made them really remarkable, in my eyes, was how they have gone about making a difference for other people.

For most of us truly making a difference, is in the same category as losing weight, something we aspire to, but something which may never happen.

Eleven years ago, Dorothy and Bill were enjoying a treat that they had looked forward to for many years.  They had just sold the restaurant and were backpacking around Asia staying, somewhat incongruously, at 5 star hotels.  One day on the way back to their hotel, their tuk- tuk driver told them that a night at that hotel, cost as much as he earned in two months.  They started to do the math.  They realized that, back home, they were spending $140 a week at their favorite coffee shop.  They were aware that by contrast, the average Vietnamese family got by on about $60 a month.  A little later they were approached in a park here in Ho Chi Minh City, by some playful kids who wanted to practise their English.  Bill and Dorothy wanted to practice making a difference, so it was a good match.  Over time they sponsored seven children in Vietnam and two families in Cambodia.  With their help, all seven Vietnamese students have graduated higher education.  In Cambodia, they built a house for one family at a cost of $2,300.  It is the best house in the village.  They set the same family up with a tuk-tuk business.

I thought maybe that their motivation was religious.  I was wrong.  It was simply that it was "fun" to be able to help.

It is humbling to listen to Dorothy and Bill,  but on a lighter note, it also reminds me to keep Silver Mining - I never know what I might find!