Small World

            Everyone always tells you that it’s a small world. I know what they mean, but it’s hard to agree, with over 6 billion people on the planet and so many countries and places to visit it could take you a lifetime. However, a few years ago I was faced with my own proof that the world is indeed small (in some respects anyway). I was reading a book called Take Me With You by Brad Newsham.  It was a true story about a man who travelled the world in order to find someone he could give a gift to and take them back to America with him for a holiday. Newsham travelled all around Asia and Africa and made lots of friends with locals along the way. When he returned to America, he wrote back to all the friends he had made. A few of these friends wrote back to him, these names he put in a hat to randomly choose whom he would invite to America. The person he chose was Tony, a man from a small village near the Banaue rice terraces in the Philippines.  He then brought Tony back to America to visit him and raised money to send Tony to a proper dentist and to get a proper glass eye, as he had lost his eye in an accident.

            I used to live in the Philippines and had actually trekked though the rice terraces in Banaue. In the book it mentioned that Tony had a wife called Rita. This sounded very familiar to me, as our guide for a 3-day trek through the rice terraces was a woman called Rita and her husband whom I had forgotten the name of. This was such a coincidence that I couldn’t help but wonder if they were the same people as in the book. I decided to find out, so I looked up Brad Newsham’s contact details on his website and sent him an e-mail telling him my story and asking him if he had a photo of Rita, to see if it was the same woman. A few days later a lovely e-mail came back with a photo of Rita, Tony and their kids. Rita was the same lady who had guided us around the rice terraces and her husband, Tony had come to find us in the terraces after he heard that some tourists had been attacked by rebels nearby.

            It was amazing to discover a whole book about these 2 people in a book, 6 years after I had met them in a tiny village in the Philippines. This showed me that no matter where you are in the world, it is a small place.