Have you helped someone today?

Once again it was morning, in another city, in another country, sunny, fresh and full of surprises. The bus stopped after a half an hour of rhythmical clink-clanking and I stepped off a little drowsy into an early morning hustle and bustle of the city market. Rivers of people hurrying to work were intersected with sellers dragging huge bundles of this and that, honking, grumbling, bellowing.  So even I, who normally wouldn’t notice if an elephant walked by at that time of the morning, spotted an old lady ahead of me stooping to pick up some dropped oranges. I quickened my step to give her a hand but, just before I reached her, she had dunked the last one into her bag and was already marching in front of me. A minute later an orange missile whizzed past my ear straight into the old lady’s back and was soon followed by another one. The granny surprisingly didn’t look back. She just kept on marching, even if not a little faster. A shout that accompanied the second flying orange made me drop my jaw, “Shame on you! Stealing in those years! Here, take some more with you!”.

A little further, if you turn left around the corner, a long street will get you right to the city center. However, after only a couple of days of walking up and down the local main street, you might  start approaching it as if it were a ski path and adopt a zigzagging technique trying to evade “the money collectors” bumping into people, getting into their way or dragging them by the sleeve to sell some cards or badges to help the abandoned kids, animals or refugees. Always the same plastic smiles on the same faces, never early in the morning though. If they hadn’t been smiling so much they might have persuaded me that all the money was really going to end up in the right hands and not just some symbolic percentage of it.  

Obviously, so many phonies in the streets account for some of human disregard for those who really need help, yet not for all of it. Many studies have confirmed that a person could easily die in the middle of the street full of people if they suddenly collapsed. The scientists explain this social and psychological phenomenon as the Bystander Effect. I witnessed one such unfortunate event and was horrified feeling all the cruelness of the humanity in those very long minutes of trying to call for help as I realised that I couldn’t move a collapsed man on my own. He was lying in the middle of the street and the cars just kept circling around us. The man was unconscious and in some sort of physical agony his body shaking and twitching, whereas I trembled for quite a while later from the emotional agony of this shameful incident.  

Anyhow, such human reaction, or rather lack of it, in a situation in which somebody is spread on the street and another person cries out loud for help gives you a clue of what happens to those who are not as loud.

@ UNHCR/Florian/Transparency/Photovoice

However, being ignored is not the worst that can happen to a person. In a clash of two ethnic groups, at the time of madness, when my family had to leave home, not only were we ignored, we were kicked out of a temporary shelter we managed to find in the exile. We were kicked out into the street again, only this time by the people of the same nationality, the locals. The motive was as ancient as the human race - pure, old-fashioned, insatiable greed. Somebody needed more space for themselves. So it happened that our lives were threatened again. An important lesson was learnt however on realising that one is not to fear any ethnicity or religion but some ever present human flaws.

The society is indeed full of controversies. On the one hand you have a whole new spectrum of volunteering agencies making money on the increasing number of people who want to cross oceans to help and, on the other, you have people dying before the eyes of passers-by. Sometimes people don’t realise that you don’t have to go far away if you want to help somebody. Why not start with your closest members of the family, friends and neighbours, fellow citizens? Perhaps volunteering agencies would then go bankrupt.
                                                                                                 
An interesting idea has been launched through a book called Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde and later a film made by it in which a little boy Trevor does a favor for three people, asking each of them to "pay the favor forward" by doing favors for three other people, and so on. It sounds much like a fiction so I was surprised to find out that The Pay It Forward Movement does actually exist as well as its Foundation.

If you ask the professionals, they will tell you that helping people works in two ways - by helping others, you help yourself. When a renowned psychiatrist Dr Karl Menninger was asked what a person should do if he or she felt a “nervous breakdown” coming on, he said “Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them.”

I would just like to add another aspect to it by returning to the unconscious man in the road. After a while, one of the cars that were circling around us finally stopped and a guy jumped out of it to help. He quickly moved the man to the pavement, put him in the right position, rubbed his temples with some water and continued stroking his head even after the man had regained consciousness. I think the guy wasn’t aware of it, but his stroking silenced more than the man’s pain and fear. I could as well feel my shivers subside with every gentle move of his hand and the world suddenly appeared to be a friendlier place to live.