I have found that help often comes not from the expected people and places, but from some of the most random sources. In my not-so-very vast lifetime, I have been aided by many strangers. There was one time in Miami, I was taking public transportation to South Beach, but had no clue how to get there, so asked some people who were travelling with me. Everyone around me was hispanic, so I tried to find the most caucasian person, hoping they would speak English. However, they all gave me blank stares of incomprehension. Oddly enough, the one guy who looked to me like he had just stepped off the boat from Cuba, said to me in perfectly clear English, "I am getting off at that stop. Just follow me and I will show you were it is." He did too!
The most recent example of help from strangers came to me on Sunday. My flat-mate, Mom, sisters, and I were trying to push my car off the street because the starter had died and I did not want to get a parking ticket for being there at the wrong time of day. A guy in a large, red, plumbing and heating co. van stopped and asked what we were doing. He proceded to take a look at my car and try to fix it. As it turns out, he had been an auto mechanic for some twenty-odd years and definitely knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, the starter was in worse shape than we had realized. It had managed to get itself fused in place. After two hours of working on it and taking out every tool he owned (including a blow torch!), he realized he was not going to be able to get it off without puttin the car on a lift. And actually, even the shop I brought the car to ended up breaking the piece to get it off after going through the same torture the first guy went through. I felt bad for the guy because he probably expected it to be an easy task when he took it on. I thank him profusely for stopping to help. His response was sweet: "you're like my daughter. People just need to help each other out. WHen I drove by and saw half a dozen women trying to push a car, I thought 'something is wrong with this picture!"" His own daughter is several years older than me (that is what he was talking about when he said I was like his daughter). He may not have been able to fix my car, but it meant a lot to me that he was willing to take so much of his time to try to help me, a perfect stranger.
Being the cynical NYer that I am, it is easy for me to dispair that there are no "good samaritans" left in the world. Thankfully, God sends his messengers of mercy every once in a while to remind us that they still exist.
