Say what you will about social media, but sometimes it works miracles. Take the story of Mevan Bakabar, a 29-year-old woman living in London. When she was just a year old, Bakabar and her family fled Iraq in 1991 in order to escape Saddam Hussein and his Kurdish genocide, she tells the Australia Broadcasting Company’s Hack.
They travelled overland through Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia, and eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Holland.
"This camp was actually the first piece of stability that we'd ever had," Mevan said.
"It was a place where I just got to be a child again, and not necessarily worry about a roof over our heads, and not worry about what we were going to eat that night, or how we're going to get our way out the country.
Bakabar only has good memories of the workers at the camp that she called home until she was six years old—but one aid worker in particular stood out. This man and his generosity stuck with Bakabar for the rest of her life. But the rest of that period in her life, she told Hack, started to fade with time.
So she returned to her native Iraq a few months ago, then retraced her family’s journey to the Netherlands. "I thought it was really important to me, for understanding my own history and identity, to go back through these places," Bakabar told Hack.
Once in Zwolle, the town that housed the camp, the former refugee tried to find the aid worker but she didn’t even know his name. That’s when Bakabar took to Twitter.
Within an hour, her plea had been retweeted thousands of times, and she was fielding media requests. Within two hours, she heard from someone who claimed to be a former colleague of his. And within just ten hours, thanks to that coworker and local journalists, Bakabar knew her hero’s name.
(T)he man she was seeking was still alive, he lived in the Netherlands, his name was Egbert, and he'd like her to come over for tea.
Just 36 hours after her “long shot” tweet, Bakabar and her cherished friend were reunited at last—after a magical drive, of course.
Egbert, who asked that his last name remain private, was shocked to learn that a simple bicycle meant so much to Bakabar. As she put it, “He thought the bike was too small a gesture to make such a big fuss about.”
But that’s the thing about small gestures: We have no control of how large an impact they can have on others. In 2011, the late, great Dr. Maya Angelou encouraged us to “be the rainbow in someone’s cloud,” a bit of advice she’d adapted from a 19th century African American spiritual. Great advice for sure—especially when we consider that acts of kindness that might feel insignificant to us, such as giving a bright red bike to a young child with nothing—can mean everything to the recipient.
Unsurprisingly, Bakabar and Egbert’s whirlwind reunion has sparked quite the ripple effect. Former refugees are sharing their own stories with Bakabar on Twitter, and at least two other fans of Egbert (and his wife) have surfaced. As Bakabar tweeted on Tuesday, one former refugee stated that “they weren’t friends to me, they were family.” What a stark contrast to so many nations’ treatment of refugees today.
As her wild adventure finally wound down, Mevan chose to leave a few words of wisdom and gratitude with her thousands of new admirers.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.