The Kindness of Strangers

It was already very late into the evening when we navigated through the German town of Stendhal last summer. When the telephone collapsed and the printed map, as if on purpose, showed us only the major streets and nothing nearby. No navigation. Both mobiles off. Just the drizzle and two small kids at the back of the car who really wanted to be stretching their feet in the warm beds after a long drive from Antwerp. We had one scare already when we got stuck in the queues for miles and after an hour our gears refused to cooperate and we were lucky to steer over to the hard shoulder of the motorway. My husband, unable to engage any gear at all and without any working phone, started to panic. Then he bent down and moved the clutch with his hand. This worked, but we were still scared as we carried on driving – confident at that stage that we would find our destination.

Stendhal greeted us with almost empty roads. No human in site, shops put to rest for the night, and no petrol station to stop by or a taxi driver to talk to and a detour around the city because of roadworks that completely took us off course and messed up the organization of the town that I had in my head. There must be a way of figuring out where we we staying, I thought to myself, trying not to lose hope just yet even though I was increasingly getting agitated and restless. The children’s tension mounted and then it broke out with joy as a Burger King stood there lit like a lighthouse in the stormy sea. We parked the car and checked if there was anyone in. We saw people moving but they could not see us. The doors were shut. We were searching for alternatives in our head. We had none. If it was about petrol, we could walk there. No problem. If it was about distance, we could call a taxi, but it was primarily about our lack of direction and no one who we could communicate with. There was no one to whom we could have talked to, until of course there was.

We spotted two people who had just walked out through the back door of the Burger King in a joyful and chatty mood. Did we just miss them? Were we too late? We ran to them for rescue and we explained our predicament. They glanced at our kids and willingly typed the address of our accommodation into their smartphones. We still couldn’t navigate it as all the mobiles seemed to refuse to cooperate with us that evening. As if we meant to talk for a bit longer and learn where we were all from. And so we’ve learnt that they were from Syria and they’ve been settling down there slowly, and they asked for our origin and whereabouts and we prayed together for the phone to give us the direction that it refused to give. Nothing was changing, the postcodes were not accepted, the network circulated in a loop. We grew in frustration and we almost resigned to spend the night at the carpark when all of a sudden a third person came out of the Burger King, attentive and quick, just in a few seconds asked us what has happened and without hesitation took the postcode and typed it into his car’s navigation. ‘No problem. I will drive you there.’ – he said. We couldn’t believe it. He was so quick to help. What’s your name, I asked: ‘Hadi’. He said. Where are you from? Syria. I smiled. A long time ago I was dreaming of taking a Syrian family to safety and it was a person from Syria who took us to safety. Maybe God takes into account good intentions, too, I thought to myself, while we reached our destination being guided by Hadi.

Thank you, Hadi. :)