Line upon Line

In the aftermath of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, Sharon Eubank visited Sri Lanka as part of a project that was helping fishermen and seamstresses get tools again to continue their trades and support their families. While there, her driver took her to visit the place where the daily train used to pass.

When locals had heard the siren for the tsunami months before, the train had stopped there. The people all around, assuming this heavy train on its high track would be the safest place to be, had handed up their children and babies to the passengers to protect. But when the wave came, it swept the train right off its track, and it became twisted and mangled by the strength of the water, killing everyone onboard.

Now, five months later, Sharon asked her driver, Shanthe, why those outside the train that survived were still camped here. “This was the last time they were together as a family,” came the poignant reply.

“I couldn’t help them.” Sharon told me in a recent interview, “I couldn’t speak their language. I couldn’t describe to them what I was doing.” By contrast, Shanthe, who was a Sri Lankan himself, got out a soccer ball and started playing with the children. A woman brought him some bread to taste, made from yeast he had brought her before. Another asked if he could find her some washing powder, and he said he would work on it.

“And I remember vividly standing in the dirt, not being able to do anything, and realizing Shanthe is way more powerful in this situation than I am. It doesn’t matter that I came from a big NGO and have access to humanitarian funding…I’m here for a very short time; he’s here all the time.”

“That was the first time in my life,” Sharon admitted, “that I realized, we’re most powerful where we live.”

That realization is one of the foundational principles of Sharon’s new book Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians are Changing the World. In the book, Sister Eubank shares 12 principles of service she has learned over her 28 years in the humanitarian sector.

“In my very best intentions, I’ve made so many mistakes,” says Sharon, “So I went back and I thought, what have I learned? And what advice would I give people who are at the very beginning of that journey, so that we wouldn’t have to make the same mistakes again? That’s really how it started.”

She doesn’t expect this book or these twelve principles to be the authoritative guide on effective service, but rather hopes it will be an invitation to a conversation about how we can each take greater action, wherever we are, to reach out to one another and feel personal investment in improving our communities.

And if the conversation that is catalyzed by this book is anywhere as energizing as the conversation I had with its author, its readers will go forth renewed and optimistic for a bright future that they can be a part of building.

And one of the things that really stayed with me about talking to Sharon was that the process of working toward a better future really can be bright along the way.

She shared with me and also shares in the book the story of her friend Gustavo Estrada, whom she met at an HR orientation as they both began their first day at a new job. He walked in with immediate warmth and humor, and the energy in the room seemed to change.

He was from Guatemala originally and absolutely loved to cook and share his favorite foods.

“He sponsored salsa contests in our offices—which he usually won, but he shared his recipes with everyone,” Sharon shares in the book. “He brought Guatemalan hot chocolate to boring meetings. Every Thanksgiving, he would suggest a new appetizer recipe for me to try, guaranteed to impress my notoriously sniffy family. He made hundreds of tamales before Christmas and brought some for the office lunch on the first day of the new year. He cooked Guatemalan specialties of chile verde pork and then sold the dinners to raise money for his neighborhood robotics club.”

“When Gustavo heard that a relative of mine had adopted twin boys from Guatemala, he followed the twins’ growing up with great interest. When they were twelve years old, he invited Max and Joe over to cook in his kitchen, inducting them into his special kitchen techniques. He called the twins his ‘cousins’ and presented them with his secret recipe book. In addition to the Pepian they dined on, the boys were being nourished about their country of origin in a way that fed a hunger they didn’t know they had.”

I loved hearing about how joyfully Gustavo approached his life and his service. What stuck with me the most about her stories of him was that he started from what he already loved to do; what already brought him joy, and expanded the reach of it little by little until it was blessing his whole community.

Sometimes we think that service has to be one more to-do that we can’t possibly add to our lives. We hear the calls in general conference to minister and serve, and we think that means we have to step completely out of our regular life to do something for others we’ve never done before or provide a service in which we have no existing skill set.

Instead, Eubank encourages readers in this book to start with what you’re already doing; start with what you already love. If you love sports, if you love art, if you love gardening, “take [your] interests, the things that [you] really care about, and just look for ways to expand the circle.”

“The power is in each person, Sharon says, “the expertise, the love, the fun, you have it all inside you. And if you will find an outlet for it, whatever that thing is, in your community, it will bring so much richness to your life. And it’ll also raise up your community in a better way.”

It is a worthy goal to raise up your community and not get stuck in believing you’re only serving if you’re helping people in a struggling nation on the other side of the world. Doing Small Things with Great Love includes a list of 50 ideas of ways to get started close to home. Some suggestions are as simple as “Put your phone away and interact with people by looking in their eyes,” and some as involved as “Talk to medical providers at your local low-income clinic. What are their urgent needs?”.

Whatever your starting place, reading through this list and through the more than 90 stories shared in this book will no doubt open your mind to what you could do with the time and talents you have to share.

The title of this book comes from something Mother Teresa once said: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

I asked Sharon what she feels the role of love is in the service we do, and this was her moving response:

“We often think that the thing that we’re giving, the thing that’s in our hands; the hygiene kit, the water, is the aid. That’s the thing that will help the person the most.

“But Mother Teresa’s point is that when you do a thing and you do it with dispassion…it has almost no effect. But you can do the smallest things with love, and it’s transformative. And I think about her and her ministry in India; she can’t change the fact that those people are going to die.

“But she’s going to make sure that they are washed, that they’re lying in clean sheets, that she has written a letter to somebody who’s important to them. She’s holding their hand.

“She’s putting love into the last moments of their life. And that’s really impactful when you think of problems that transform this earth. We’re talking about the whole scope of our existence.

“That is really meaningful. So, if you do something with love, it magnifies it a hundred times because of the love that you have. That’s the gift.

“That’s the aid. That’s the service. It’s not the thing that’s in your hand.”

You can get your copy of Doing Small Things With Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World on Deseret Bookshelf + or at any Deseret Book store.