Saying yes.

Yesterday, a man, seemingly of Eastern European descent was lost on 37th street. He had a presciption in hand as he asked me where the address on his hot pink post-it was located. I was walking that direction so I walked side-by-side with him. I didn't know what to say except a comment about the rain. We arrived on the street, but the number was nowhere to be found. We turned left and kept walking past an overshadowing residential building until what should appear: a little store front with the number on his post-it on its awning. He thanked me graciously. It was totally worth the discomfort of being in the wet, cold rain a bit longer than if I had gone straight to my building.

In the spirit of kindness to strangers, Cary and I had to use the autoclave machine to test out whether some surgical tools would rust. We went down to flights of stairs to ask for permission to use the lab's personal autoclave machine. The man in the lab made no fuss, and walked us to the room and showed us how to use it without even asking who we were. Now that is what I call scientific love.

Flashback:
April 2007. I remember our first day in Rome when Savita, Meera, Hana and I were unsure where we were. We couldn't find our hostel (it was off our map, go figure), and we had asked people but no one knew. Then we came up on this big, jovial looking middle-aged man. With our broken Spanish and his Italian, we managed to exchanged some words... maybe almost even communicated. He called his friends and asked on his mobile and then figured out where we were supposed to go. Then, hailing a cab, he threw 20 euro to the driver and directed him where to go. We arrived safe and sound, as the meter ended at 4.90 euro. Maybe that was why Italy was the best spring break ever. We started it off with a man willing to help four strangers, lost in what he knew as home, but what we saw as long foreign words and spaghetti.