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Two kinds of stamp

By Tom, founder of Three Smiles

My passport proves where I have been. It says nothing about what happened when I got there.

Flick through it and you get dates, airport codes and arrows in and out. Köln/Bonn in June 2022. Bali a few weeks later. Marseille the summer after. Basel-Mulhouse one December.

Every one of those stamps was given to me by someone whose job was to check I was allowed in. None of them was earned.

The stamps I remember

What I remember from those trips is not the border. It is the moments in between.

In Bali, “Om Swastiastu”, the local greeting, got me the best view in the restaurant. In France, “Santé” got my round of drinks on the house. In Turkey, one thank you made a waiter ask if I was Turkish.

None of that is written down anywhere. There is no stamp for the moment someone smiled because you tried.

A border stamp says you were let in. A smile stamp says you joined in.

So I made one

Three Smiles has a passport of its own. It works like this:

• When you say a word for real, to a real person, tick Said it.
• Say all three in one place, hello, thank you and cheers, and you earn that place’s stamp.
• Each stamp is dated and written the local way: Merhaba for Turkey, Γειά σας for Greece, こんにちは for Japan.
• Your hellos, thank yous and cheers add up at the top, and the places on your wishlist wait as dashed stamps.

On trust

Nobody checks. There is no border officer and no proof. You could tick every word on the sofa and fill the page tonight.

But you would know. The stamps only mean something because you said the words to someone, and saw what happened next. That is the whole point.

A game for the family

Children love a stamp. Give each of them a word to own, and let them be the one who says it at the bakery or the ice cream stand. When all three have been said, the stamp is theirs to collect. There is more on this in Small words, brave kids.

Share it

When the page starts to fill, tap Share my passport and send it to whoever you travelled with. It is a better souvenir than another fridge magnet, and it weighs nothing.

My real passport will run out one day, and I will get a new one with empty pages. My smile passport keeps going.