Background: Recently hero father Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes gave up his attempt to come to the United States and instead turned himself over to the Border Patrol, all to save the life of a injured nine-year-old American boy.
Cordova found the boy wandering in the Arizona desert after the boy’s mother was killed in a car crash on Thanksgiving Day. Cordova, who was promptly deported, was a noble good Samaritan–to learn more, see my recent blog post Illegal Immigrant Hero Father Deserves Medal and Visa, not Deportation.
I was very moved by the story of this good Samaritan. When I was younger, I pretty much traveled all over the world, generally by myself. (The picture is of me, age 19, visiting Jim Morrison’s grave at the Père-Lachaise cemetery cemetary in Paris. The cemetary also contains the ”Communards’ Wall/Mur des Fédérés” where 147 Communards–among the last defenders of the Paris Commune, the world’s first socialist revolution–were executed in 1871.)
While traveling I occasionally ended up in situations where I was dependent upon the kindness of a stranger. I discussed a couple examples in Good Samaritans (Part I). Another example is below.
Once while traveling in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the Soviet Union in the early ’80s, a factory worker and his wife invited me into their apartment. I had been going around the apartment complex just looking, because I had wanted to see how the average Russian lived and what their lives were like. The factory worker was fascinated by meeting an American (this was in the middle of the great Cold War tensions of the early Reagan years). I spoke some Russian, so we could communicate a bit.
Once in his apartment, predictably, we ended up drinking and, also predictably, I couldn’t come anywhere close to keeping up with him. He proposed some toasts and made a big, emotional, heartfelt toast to Richard Nixon of all people. He told me how much he wanted peace between the US and the USSR, and that he liked Nixon because with Nixon there was peace, and didn’t like Reagan because with Reagan there wasn’t peace.
He had a record player and put on a Rod Stewart record and asked me for translations of the lyrics. I did my best in my weak Russian.
It got very late into the night and he informed me that it would be very difficult for me to get back to where I was staying because at the night in Leningrad they raised all the drawbridges so the ships could get through. He insisted I stay with him and offered me a bed.
I got ready for bed and popped my contact lenses out of my eyes. When I popped the first lens out, a hard lens, he started screaming and pointing at me and calling his wife. I couldn’t figure out what he was so excited about. I then understood that he had never seen or heard of a contact lens before and thought I had popped part of my eye out or something. It took a few minutes to calm him down.
Anyway, eventually I laid down in the bed he had offered me and began to fall asleep. A few minutes later there was a little noise and I woke up and discovered that the factory worker and his wife were sleeping in the same room as me–on the floor!
I did my best to explain why this wasn’t acceptable and why we should switch, but the factory worker wouldn’t hear of it.
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