Are we good neighbours only if there's a blizzard?
By: Gordon Sinclair Jr.
I have a question for you.
Call it the Good Samaritan test.
It's lunch hour on a wind-chilled winter-like day and you're pulling out of a Safeway parking lot. The one at Kenaston Boulevard and Lindenwood Drive East.
You turn right, towards the homes in the generally affluent south-side suburban neighbourhood, far from the other side of the city, where this week police reported a steep increase in violent crime. And then, as you turn, something catches your eye. A person is standing at the bus stop, clutching a shopping bag with one hand and flagging you down with the other.
The person appears to be cold and looking for a ride.
Here's the question.
Would you stop and help?
-- -- --
This week, I put that scenario and that question to a group of staff and patrons at an optical outlet I was visiting. My little test group was hardly scientific. Seven people, all of whom happened to be women. Two were in their late 20s. One was in her early 70s. And the other four were in their 50s.
Since they were all women, the answers that followed were both predictable and surprising.
You might have noticed I had left out the age, sex and ethnicity of the hypothetical 'person' at the bus stop.
So after putting the question out, I was waiting for someone in the group to start with, "It depends..."
But before anyone could do that, one of the four 50-somethings in the group caught us all by surprise.
She said she had actually picked up someone from that exact location. In that real-life case, the 'person' was an elderly woman, but she wasn't standing at the bus stop and she wasn't asking for a ride. She was carrying groceries, though, so the middle-aged woman offered her a ride.
I was impressed. But not for long.
Having heard that story, I decided to adapt my question to fit that situation. I asked how many of the other six women would have stopped and offered the elderly woman a ride. Four of them said they would. Two said they wouldn't.
The two who wouldn't were the pair of 20-somethings.
One said she probably wouldn't have seen the elderly woman carrying her groceries. The other one, who was 27, said this: "For me it would be time."
Having heard that, I decided to tell the little test group the event that prompted the question.
Last week over the lunch hour, as I turned right out of the Lindenwoods Safeway parking lot, something caught my eye. Actually it was someone.
A man with a shopping bag in one hand was trying to flag me down with the other.
Shivering.
He was already in the car when I asked where he was going. He gave me a street name not far from my own.
His name was Kenneth Otieno, he was 34, born in Kenya, educated in England and he and his wife, Dorcas, and their little girl were living with friends while he worked as a youth pastor and counsellor at a Fort Richmond church.
Kenneth was still putting his seatbelt on when he told me he had been waiting an hour because the bus was late.
Which is why he decided to try to flag down a ride. Something, he doesn't know what, made him count as they passed.
"Twenty-five cars went by," Kenneth said. Most of the people behind the wheels were women, he recalled.
Most of them smiled at him as they drove by. He said he understood why the women hadn't stopped. They would be afraid they were picking up a "thug," as he put it.
In fact, in his crime-infested country, Kenneth said, no one stops to pick up a stranger. But he was so cold and people in Winnipeg had been so warm to him during the year he and his family have been here, he thought someone would stop.
I remember feeling such shame when he told me that.
But in the end, all that mattered to Kenneth was someone stopped so he could get home with the "baby blanket" he'd bought at Walmart for his just-turned-two daughter, Michelle, and the cough medication he'd bought for himself.
He was so grateful.
-- -- --
It was later, while I was walking Tate, my snow-white golden retriever, that I started to think about how different Winnipeggers are when we have a blizzard, like the one that famously shut down the city in March of 1966.
How, when we are all forced to slow down, and have to struggle through the snow together, we tend to see Winnipeg as one big neighbourhood.
And everyone as a neighbour who needs help when they get stuck.
Maybe that's the question I really should have asked.
Would you have given a ride to a person stranded in a blizzard? Or would you still be too frozen by fear?
gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 4, 2010 B1
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