Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas McCawkey. Thanks so much for listening.

I want to talk a little bit today about giving and receiving.

I was reading the paper the other day and something happening on the other side of the world really struck me and its implications for our practice, for our humanity, I want to share with you.

This is an excerpt from an article written by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, March 15th,

2022.

Friedman riots.

In about the last two weeks, according to Airbnb, people from 165 countries have booked more than 430,000 nights at Ukrainian homes with no intention of

using the rooms, but simply in order to donate money to these Ukrainian hosts,

most of whom they had never even heard of. Airbnb has temporarily waived all guests and host fees

for bookings in Ukraine, so those reservations translated into 17 million U.S. dollars going directly to the hosts.

So what this means is as one of the many results of the war going on, one of the responses to the war going on in Ukraine,

is that people spontaneously from all over the world got on to

Airbnb and creatively converted it into a platform and vehicle to send aid money to Ukraine.

These are people from all over who do not know the hosts of these rooms

in these towns and cities in Ukraine, and they booked random nights in order to just get money

into the country and to pledge solidarity, support, to really aid in their suffering.

There's so many lessons to take from this. It's just a remarkable act of ingenuity.

You know, there are a lot of ways to try to help when people on the planet are suffering,

especially in a war-torn country.

But to get on Airbnb and book a room in a city that might have already been bombed to oblivion,

there's something to be said about human ingenuity here.

So that's remarkable.

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