TRANSCRIPT
I was recently traveling in the country of Georgia. And when I travel, one of the things that I love to do is to visit hot springs. Just something about hot springs, natural hot water coming out of the earth from volcanic activity deep below the ground. I love it. I love to soak in it. I love to go to it.
And I was in the capital of Georgia, in Tbilisi, which from what I learned in Georgian means something along the lines of hot water because there are hot springs, natural hot springs in the capital. And I went to a place where there was a public pool of hot water. Had to pay a little bit, not very much, and I would go often and just soak in it and relax.
One day, while I was sitting in there, a father brought a little boy in there, and they were sitting at the edge of the pool. The boy was maybe four years old, three, four years old is what he looked like to me. But I was sitting in there without my glasses, so I really couldn’t see very well. And they weren’t going in the water; they were just dipping their feet in. But this pool was maybe, I don’t know, three and a half feet deep, four feet deep with the water.
And I was just in my own world. I wasn’t really there to interact, but I was in the water, out of the water, in the water, out of the water. Well, at some point, I was sitting out of the water with just my legs in the pool, and I looked and I noticed that the little boy was there dipping his legs in the pool on the other side, and the father was gone. And I thought to myself, that’s not a very good idea because this water is very hot, and I just don’t think it’s a good idea to leave a little child at the edge of a pool alone.
But there were other people around and other men, Georgian people I guess. And I don’t speak Georgian; I can speak some Russian, and they could speak some Russian with me, but pretty much people were not interacting much. And I just thought, okay, people watch him. This is a, you know, a community-based culture, so people look out for each other. So I just went back into my world.
I was sitting like this, looking down with my eyes closed, and I’ve just been in the really hot water, so it’s like, whoa, I’m a little bit in la-la land. It’s really hot. And I was there for just a few minutes, you know, just in my own self, two, three, four, five minutes. And I look up, and the little boy’s not there. I was like, oh, okay. And then I look, and he’s in the middle of the pool of water, under the water.
But I am really blind. Like right now, I take my glasses off to be able to record these videos. I can’t even see myself in the screen. I mean, I can kind of see vague movements, but that’s what I saw in the water: this boy under the water, and he was sort of waving his arms like this a little bit, like he’s kind of swimming but not swimming very well. And I’m watching, and there were other people around. Another guy was in the, you know, in the pool also, just sitting across from me, but nobody’s doing anything.
So I’m like, well, I guess they know that he’s okay. They’ve been watching him because, again, people watch people. But I’m watching, and I’m seeing this kid like move his arms, and then I’m like, I was a lifeguard once upon a time. I worked at a summer camp once when I was 18 as a lifeguard, and I’ve been around bodies of water my whole life. And suddenly I realized this kid is not swimming. He’s not coming up. He’s not holding his breath and playing because that’s what I wondered: is he holding his breath and playing? I said, I think he’s drowning.
But I’m so blind that I’m like, uh, I’m not a hundred percent sure. But then something in me, this little voice in my head says, get this kid out of the water. So I jump in. And again, I don’t—the other thing that kind of held me back from doing it is I don’t want to touch someone else’s child. It’s like, especially in a public place where I’m not part of the culture, it’s like, it’s kind of not okay in my world to touch a child. But then I’m like, dude, get in the water and get this kid out.
So I picked him up, and I realized he wasn’t breathing, and he was pretty much limp. And I noticed his belly was all distended with water in it, and I’m like, oh my god, the kid was drowning. So I brought him to the edge of the pool, and I just was sort of like on autopilot in my blindness. I’m holding him, I turned him around, and I did the Heimlich maneuver on his belly, not hard enough to really hurt him, but just to expel the water. And actually expelled the water first from his lungs, and he went like this and he coughed out all this water and something, and he took a deep breath. But like that, like, oh my god, he was drowning.
And then I turned him around to make sure he’s okay, and something, he vomited all over me because all that water was in his stomach, and he vomited all this yellow vomit all over me and into the pool of hot water. And I was like, oh my god. So I turned him around and held him. He vomited some more, this time out of the pool. And suddenly the place erupted. People were coming over, and this guy who was in the pool also, he came over and he’s like talking to me. And then he’s talking to me in Georgian and Russian, and I’m trying to talk to this kid, and I’m talking to the kid, and I said to this guy, and I’m like, papa, get there, papa, where’s the papa? You know, I’m telling him, you know, go find the father.
So the guy gets out, and the father’s nowhere to be seen. And other people are coming around; they see me holding this kid. And I turn the kid around, and he like kind of clings on to me like a little animal, this soft little boy. He’s holding on to me, and I’m just holding him, and I was like, this is such a bizarre situation, and I really was in shock by it all.
Well, what happened is the father was in the bathroom. He went to the bathroom and left his kid alone. Not a good idea; his kid could have died. So I handed the kid to him, and the father took him and went off with the kid. And then this guy who was sitting there in the pool started talking to me, and it turned out that the guy spoke Spanish, and I speak Spanish. He was a Georgian fellow, but he spoke Spanish well. He told me in Spanish, he goes, you just saved this kid’s life. And I realized it was true. I’d say I’d never saved anyone’s life, not directly. Maybe as a therapist, I, through psychology, through listening, through caring and loving, I saved some people’s lives probably in my travels in the world. Maybe I saved some lives, but never directly with my hands. This was a different experience.
And I suddenly just started crying. I—it was just overwhelming, sitting in this hot pool with vomit on me, and I washed it off of me, and it was just like in shock. And this guy just put his hand in me, you just saved a life. And I was like, it was true.
Well, then what happened is the father came back, and the father’s brother was there, and these two men turned out they weren’t even Georgian; they were from a different country. They were visiting; they were from Moldova, actually. And they were thanking me in Russian and shaking my hand. And then the little boy came; he wanted to shake my hand, and I was worried that he’d be traumatized. As it turned out, I stayed in the hot water and just tried to skim the vomit off the water, and I stayed there. The little boy did come back, and he wanted to get in the water, and I talked about it with the guy who spoke Spanish, and I was like…
This little kid, do you think he’ll be traumatized? He wasn’t sure, but what happened is the little boy did come in the water. He kept taking water in his mouth and spitting it out like in an arc. So I started doing it with him, and the two of us were doing it sort of as a game. I realized he was replicating his trauma.
What was interesting is in the world, when I travel, very uncommonly do little children come and want to be really close to me. Unless, of course, I’m friends with their parents, and then they’re very open. But they first pretty much always get the indication whether it’s safe to interact with me or any other stranger from their parents first. Because the world does teach stranger danger. Be careful of strangers.
Well, this little boy had no fear of me. He wanted to bump me. He fist bumped me like a million times. He wanted to splash water on me, and I realized he really loved me. And the thing is, I felt this. I loved him. It was like, you know, I don’t have children, but I do have children, and he was one of my children. It was so dear. It was like he was my little boy.
If I hadn’t jumped in the water and saved him, if it had gone on for another minute, for all I know, he would have died. I could see that he didn’t have any brain damage; he was fine. I think by playing with me in the water, by spitting the water out and me spitting it with him and us having fun, it was like he got back on the horse, as it were. He made it his own experience where he made a new friend out of it, and I really don’t think he was traumatized by it.
And that was so important to me. That was something that was very meaningful to me because it’s a horrible and sad thing when a child learns very early on to become afraid of something that’s beautiful, like the water. I’ve heard that many times: people who had a scary experience in the water and they never want to swim again; they’re afraid of drowning. Well, I don’t think this boy felt that because he came in the water. He also learned that adults who are not his family, complete strangers, can be beautiful people. They can save your life.
I felt that. I felt that he had an incredible trust in me. His father again shook my hand many times and thanked me. But then what’s interesting, check this out: the guy, the Spanish guy, this Georgian fellow who talked with me, he became my friend. He said, “I would like you, I invite you to come back and live with me and my family.” And I did that. It took a little while, took like 10 days or two weeks later when he was actually going back. He lived in a different part of Georgia, in a mountainous region.
[Music]
And I went with him, and I lived with his family that had children, his mother, and siblings. I met his extended family, and I lived in this small community. There weren’t hot springs there, but there was another type of natural phenomenon within hitchhiking and walking distance of his home, and that was glaciers. I also love glaciers—glaciers being a phenomenon that are fading in the world, that are slowly disappearing. Maybe in 20, 30, 50, 100 years, maybe there won’t be any more glaciers except in maybe really remote places in the world, like Antarctica.
So I got to go visit this glacier many times, and it was gorgeous. I feel the combination of being in this remote place of Georgia, way up in the mountains, really near the border of Russia. This glacier was just, I think, only like a mile or two from the Russian border. Being able to experience this glacier, being able to be in this wild culture in Svanetti in northern Georgia, and I think most importantly, to live with this new family, to be welcomed there, to feel like a member of the family, to have a wonderful experience that held me like I was able to hold this little boy. In a way, this is what made my trip meaningful—this experience and all that followed from it.
And so I look back on this, this time, this wild world that we live in of natural phenomena, like natural hot springs, like glaciers, people being able to help other people, love, kindness, generosity, intercultural sharing. This, this so much more gives my life value, and I believe it gives the world value too.