Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
I'm a 21-year-old Winnipegger who typed this story with my thumbs on my iPhone as I sat on a plastic stool at a streetside café in Phong Nha, Vietnam. The population here is 970, give or take a handful of scrappy backpackers and our taped-together motorcycles.
The road to get here has been a long one, and not just the 17-hour mountain drive in the monsoon rain. The journey began when I left my hometown at 17, scared, cynical and searching for adventure. Moving to Miami for university as a teenager was terrifying but it gave me the courage to keep exploring.
Travelling alone hasn't been easy but it's been anything but lonely: There are honest, good-hearted people everywhere.
Once, I thought I'd been kidnapped on the Honduras-Nicaragua border after being shoved onto a bus and watching the police get into a heated argument with the driver, which suddenly resolved with a nod and a handshake bursting with dollar bills. Turns out, I was on a busload of hospital patients who were driving back to El Salvador. They adopted me for the 10-hour drive, generously paying my customs fees before leaving me at the door of a hostel with a honk and a wave.
And so when my backpack snapped off of my motorcycle in rural Vietnam, luggage rack, bungee cords and all, I should have guessed that it wasn't the end of the story.
Obviously, I was never going to see the bag again. The laptop, cash and clothes inside were an absolute gold mine for whoever snagged it off of the road.
But I went to the police station the next morning anyway. No one spoke a single word of English, not even hello.
"Xin Chao!"
The officers stared. After a few long minutes of gesturing on my part and gawking on theirs, I was waved into a chair and an officer handed me his phone. His wife spoke a bit of English and did her best to translate. Eventually, they gave up on the phone and his wife drove to the station, pulling up in heels and a moped.
But Chau, his wife, seemed more concerned about getting me a change of clothes and a toothbrush than anything else and so I gave up on getting a statement for my insurance.
Filthy, exhausted and wanting nothing more than to get back to my hostel and panic, I tried my best to escape, but she was insistent in her kindness. Within the hour, I was in her home, offered lunch and shoved into the bathroom with a towel and a less-than-subtle suggestion that I needed a shower. After a round of selfies, we became friends on Facebook and I said goodbye.
For a week, we chatted online in broken English but I had no success in finding my bag. I called the Canadian embassy. I called my travel insurance. I called my mother and explained I might not be leaving Vietnam for a while.
I was beginning to find freedom in my new minimalist existence, so my motorbike and I drove up the coast to a pocket of white sand tucked between rocky cliffs. I collapsed there, waiting for updates from the embassy and the insurance company, a painful process soothed by the sun and the sea.
A week later, I logged onto my Facebook account and saw posts in Vietnamese. The only Viet I know is "thank you" and my coffee order. Someone had my laptop, the laptop that automatically logs me in to Facebook, no password required.
Chau, my new Facebook friend, figured out the poster was trying to offer my passport back without admitting that he had – and was planning on keeping – my computer and the rest of my things.
My passport! I ran around the hostel trying to borrow a phone and begged the staff to call this guy and translate for me. Crouching in the dark and swatting away mosquitoes, I gnawed at my nails as the phone call wore on. The bartender-turned-translator hung up with a sigh. "Well … it's complicated. He is afraid of the police."
But in the end, the guy met the owner of my last hostel on a street corner, handed over my passport and ran. Two days later, I stood at a bus stop in Hoi An, greedily ripping open the brown paper package that made the 407 kilometre journey to me. My passport was streaked with dirt and soggy with humidity, but it was back!
As for the rest of the stuff, I can't be angry. It was just stuff, crap that my travel insurance will probably cover. For whoever snagged it off the road, it was far more valuable. In a country where everyone has so little, where busted tires are still cut up and used for shoes, where the police are thirsty for bribes, where the land is pockmarked with bomb craters and land mines, where villagers still toil hours in the sun as they wade thigh-deep through rice paddies, how can I blame an opportunist for taking the gift that landed in his lap?
But my passport story represents the spirit of Vietnam, the strange mix of enormous need and humbling generosity. This man could easily have tossed the passport without a second thought. Instead he put himself at risk of being caught and reached out. He found the sweet spot in that grey area we call morality.
Passport in hand, I have a redoubled respect for the courage and kindness of people who give everything that they can afford.
Lily Kaufmann lives in Winnipeg when she's not travelling.