The Nairobi Academy is a private school situated close to the foot of the Ngong Hills in Kenya where I grew up, part of a small community of Jewish ex-patriots from all over the world. Maasai legend tells that these seven hills are the grass covered knuckles of a fearsome giant who sank into the earth. Here, in this stunningly beautiful natural setting our headmaster, Mr. Bentley, provided us with more than just a well-rounded education and traditional English discipline. We were also taught to do charitable acts.

It left me with a clear conscience Once, together with another student, I organized a bake-sell event. We were eager to raise money for the White Rhino which was in danger of extinction due to poaching. We stuck little white labels with prices on the cookies and cupcakes that our classmates had baked and at recess, we set up tables and sold everything. I enjoyed the fundraising: it was fun, and it left me with a clear conscience knowing I had done my bit in the fight for the conservation of endangered wildlife.

In an effort to mold us into positively contributing members of society, Mr. Bentley instituted the annual visit of children from the Dagoretti Orphanage. Weeks before their visit, which always took place towards the end of December, we were asked to donate our old clothes and toys. The orphans received these gifts in some sort of presentation ceremony which I have forgotten; my eyes and heart were focused on the orphans themselves.

In my last year at the school, I was part of the group that brought the children from the orphanage to our school. We drove to Dagoretti Corner, a slum area on the outskirts of Nairobi, in our school buses. A delivery boy, on a bicycle piled high with bread, was pedaling along the side of the road. Where there should have been a pavement, there was a stream of mud. We passed a butchery of sorts. The heads of sheep and cows stared out from among a pile of garbage.

The children were waiting for us outside the orphanage. I saw motley hand-me-downs: checked shirts with stripped pants, a pink blouse with a green ruffled skirt. Then I saw excitement, eagerness and joy flashing in charcoal-black eyes. The cast-off costumes suddenly became children. John Muller, a strapping Boer, lifted a little boy off his wheelchair and carried him onto the bus. The boy's useless chocolate-colored legs stuck out of his khaki shorts like two twigs on the Acacia trees that dotted the side of the road. As I folded up the wheelchair, I saw that John's shirt was wet; so were the child's pants. I put the wheelchair under the bus. On the ride to school, one of the staff members walked up and down the bus letting the children take turns holding his grass snake.

Back at school, we returned to our math class and other students took the children to the Eucalyptus grove across from our classrooms. Through the open door, I watched a magician pull a rabbit and then a streamer of colored scarves out of a hat. An excited child waved a crutch with a multi-colored padding of rags wound round the top. The tricks continued; so did our math lesson.

Then the Dagoretti children gave their offering Then the Dagoretti children gave their offering: a choir. Their voices rose and fell in harmony with the rustle of the Eucalyptus trees. I heard the quiver of tambourines and the high pitched tinkle of triangles. Then I heard the rhythmic thud of a lone drum join the choir and set the beat. The drummer was the crippled boy whose wheelchair I had stored. Even at a distance, I could see the skin across his cheekbones stretched as tight as the mottled cow hide that formed the top of his drum. He was putting his soul into his drumming—so deep was his desire to give back a little of the joy he felt on this outing. I saw how much he was enjoying this day out, and I knew that I was a part of making this day work for him. With this realization, the light in my heart began to flicker. Mr. Bentley's vision had taken root: that day I learned to treasure giving not only for the joy that such acts instill in the receiver, but also for the joy they inspire in the giver.

My school years behind me, I moved to Israel, where I learned that in Judaism charitable acts are called acts of chesed and that people in communities in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Beit Shemesh, the Negev and the Shomron—throughout Isreal— have taken words like charity, loving kindness, and good deeds and are living them out, in a Jewish version. I watched them practicing this craft of chesed daily, hourly, by the minute. Holding tight onto the flickering light in my heart that had been ignited by the Dagoretti children, I began to take tentative steps to copy the people around me. I volunteered to clean this lady's house when she was sick and to cook supper for that lady's children when she was out of town.

One day, flipping through a neighborhood telephone directory, I saw endless lists of "Gemachs" (free loan societies). There were Gemachs for folding benches, car roof racks, bicycles, money, linens, refrigerators, sound systems, moving boxes, medical equipment, diapers, highchairs, luggage, tefillin, faxes, and snake catchers. Some Gemachs had fixed hours, others were open-ended. I was fascinated: you could borrow anything; there was someone to help you with everything. I wondered if I, too, would open a Gemach one day.

The seed, a love of giving, had grown I married and moved to Beit Shemesh. Fifteen years ago, this was still an old, somewhat impoverished town. Religious neighborhoods were beginning to sprout round the established nucleus of the city, and with them came the Gemachs.

Shortly after the first phonebook of our new neighborhood came out, we began receiving calls asking about our hot plates and our wedding dresses. I told the callers that they had the wrong number, because we did not have a hot plate or a wedding dress Gemach. But after six or seven such calls in the space of a week, I checked the phone book. Sure enough, we had been listed as running a hot plate and a wedding dress Gemach. I felt that I was being directed form Above, so we bought a hot plate and opened a Gemach with one hot plate. Today we have three large ones and five small ones that are used almost every Shabbat. As for the wedding dresses, it took a few years till someone else answered that call.

Last week my daughter, Naomi, asked if I was prepared to forgo her help getting ready for Shabbat so that she could volunteer at a Friday afternoon child-care service for handicapped children. Every Friday at noon, when the sun and Shabbat preparations reach the zenith, and every woman is busy cooking and cleaning, the child-care organization opens its doors to physically-challenged children. With the help of teenage volunteers, an adult volunteer serves the children lunch, plays with them, gives them a shower and dresses them for Shabbat. The children go home to a mother who has managed to get ready for Shabbat in relative peace and who now has some energy left to enjoy her children.

That first Friday afternoon without Naomi's help was hectic, but when she came home, a short hour before candle lighting, and I saw her face radiating with the special joy that comes from doing the right thing, I didn't regret the whirlwind I'd been through. I thought then of the Dagoretti children, of the joy we had brought them and the joy and light they had ignited in my heart. The seed, a love of giving, that had been planted at a school on the slopes of the Ngong Hills, had grown into a love of chesed that was now being passed down to the next generation.