Pay It Forward

We recently lost one of my co teachers due to her contract finishing.  She was the one who trained me showed me the ropes and shared all of her ideas with me (we taught the same age class).  While she will be sorely missed, we have gained a new teacher to take her place.  We have all been helping the new teacher out so that she can make a smooth transition.  This past week, she got a few big boxes delivered to the school and didn't really have any way of getting them home (we all pretty much live in the same apartment building).  I offered to help and we walked out to the intersection to hail a cab with huge boxes in our arms.  Now, in previous posts, I have talked a little about cab drivers and how they can be picky about who they let in their car.  Cab drivers generally want someone who is not in a big group, someone who has minimal luggage, and someone who wants to be dropped off at a high traffic location.  We fell into 2 of these categories and as we stood there trying to hail a cab, with the huge boxes at our feet, they all zoomed by, not wanting to pick us up.  I was explaining to the new teacher why they don't want to pick us up as she had this discouraged look on her face.

All of the sudden, there is a SUV slowly creeping by with a Korean man at the wheel staring at us.  He pulls over and gets out of the car.  He walks up to us and asks if we need help taking our boxes to wherever they need to go.  We kind of look at each other with skepticism and decide that maybe we shouldn't.  After all, in the good ole US of A, we are taught never to get in cars with strangers.  So, with this in mind (our mothers should be so proud!!), he continues to try to talk us into it.  He says that he used to live in Oregon and that when he was there, so many kind foreigners helped him when he needed it.  His English was pretty good and we could tell that he had definitely either been well educated or spent some time in an English speaking country, or both.  We looked in his car and saw that there was a child seat inside which meant he was a family man, so maybe we could trust him. 

We finally agreed to let him take us, since our place was only a few blocks away and we were together.  He lifted the boxes into the vehicle and when I offered to help, he simply said that he was a man and he should do it. We got in the car and started driving.  He told us he had 2 daughters and he wanted them to speak better English.  I told him what school we worked at and how we really liked the style of teaching that they offer.  He said that he had put his daughter in our school's program at a different branch and that they were displeased with the way that things were handled.  As the new teacher and I tried to talk up our school, he repeatedly discredited it.  Oh well, you win some and you lose some! We also talked a little about the holiday that would occur that same week and how he thought that it was unfair sometimes the way that women were treated in Korea. 

When we got out at our apartment he proceeded to unload the boxes.  When the new teacher asked him if she could give him any money, he said that was very offensive in Korea and that she shouldn't offer money to someone who willingly offers to help you...good to know!   We thanked him multiple times and were so glad getting into the elevator that we had gotten help (those boxes were heavy). 

So, the moral of this story is that you should always try to help people out when you can, because you never know when you are going to need someone to help you.  You also never know where a kind act can lead; PAY IT FORWARD! 

Until next time...