Bruce  Bruce Langone
It started on December 17th 1995. I was on a well planned trip to sort out my life and get my priorities in order. It was all about me. My future, my happiness, my THINGS. And then there he appeared. It was HOT and down the street he was hauling 2 baskets of coconuts attached to a pole that he balanced on his back. It had to weigh at least 20 pounds. By this point I had become and expert at shooing the street kids away. I was told this was necessary so as not to encourage the children to do this. I did not know that they had no other options to get money. But something SEEMED different about him. When he sat next to me on a bench adjacent to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Ho Chi Minh City, I expected to be solicited yet again by another street kid. Poor me. Then he sat down next to me, smiled, and put his head on my shoulder. No begging, no pleading. Just silence. We sat in silence for about 30 minutes and he had to have slept the entire time. That was it. He just needed someone to lean on.. How I was able to walk away from him is something I cannot describe. In a space of 30 minutes I was no longer “ME.” I wanted to be “US”. If it was legal I would have brought him back to the United States to raise him on my own. And so went the spark that led me down the road to a path that has brought me more peace and happiness than I ever had.I GOT IT! My future was so re-directed that it took me at least a month to realize it had. And that was just the beginning. My mind was floating in the clouds and I distinctly remember it felt like the night before Christmas when I was young. What SHOULD I do? What COULD I do? What WOULD I do? While fully enlightened, I knew that starting a charitable endeavor in Vietnam would not be easy. I could just write checks to a charity that operated there. I could get a couple of photos and a nice plaque or some other offering of gratitude. But my ambitions and hopes were much larger than that. I have spent the past 16 years with that same feeling of it being Christmas time. My kids….MY KIDS! Anyone who says that money cannot buy happiness has never given it to a worthwhile cause and worked to put it to good use. Bruce Langone <!--EndFragment--> |
