Everywhere in our daily lives, we are provided with opportunities to not only improve ourselves, but to help someone else. Whether it be a doctor or nurse saving a life or your local grocery store clerk saying something to make a customer smile, if only for a brief second, we have the chance to make someone’s day better, regardless of how well we do or don’t know them. I’ll preface the following story by saying that I work overnights in a hospital laboratory. Between the hours of 2230 and 0500, I have the opportunity to save someone’s life…seriously. However, the situation that I found myself in the other night while working had nothing to do with any of the fancy testing I run on patients’ blood work or other hospital care related tasks that I do on a nightly basis to help complete strangers live better lives. Instead, I found myself with an interesting opportunity while I was walking down a lengthy and silent hallway from the laboratory I work in to the hospital cafeteria. This evening at work was just like any other Wednesday night. Nothing particularly exciting was happening. The Emergency Room was slow and study like usual. Patients’ samples trickled in throughout the night for testing, and things were moving along just fine. Around 0130 or so I decided to head to the cafeteria for some less than incredible dinner, but dinner nonetheless. The laboratory I work in is quite some distance from the cafeteria which resides on the ground floor of the main hospital, and the buildings are connected by a long, quiet, and lonely skywalk. I began the long walk over to the cafeteria, and about halfway there I noticed a young black man sitting on the floor of the hallway with a backpack, a book on the floor, and a cell phone plugged into the outlet. He was decently dressed, but looked out of place. We exchanged greetings, and I moved on to the cafeteria. After finding something for dinner, I carried my meal back to the lab, again passing by the young man who was now slowly reading out loud from a book. I continued back to the break room in the building where the lab resides. Upon arriving in the break room, I grabbed a seat and began to eat while exchanging some small talk with one of my co-workers. Again, this was nothing out of the ordinary for a night at work. During my meal though, I kept thinking about the young man in the hallway. This was my moment to make a complete stranger’s day better, and to make his life, which I knew nothing about, just a little bit easier. After finishing my dinner, I decided to take a quick walk back down the hallway to see if the young man was still there. I found the young man sitting in the same spot, still kind of fumbling through the book he was reading. I casually leaned against the wall and listened in for a little bit as he slowly worked his way down the page, reading each word aloud. After a moment he noticed me and looked up. I asked the young man if he was here with someone in the hospital, and he politely replied “No, I’m just charging my cell phone.” I asked him if he was hungry, which he quietly replied, “yes.” I told him to follow me, and I would buy him some dinner. He seemed surprised, shocked even, that a complete stranger was offering to buy a warm meal and share a few moments of decent conversation. He gathered his belongings, and made sure to mark his page in his book. “Page 11,” he said aloud. As we walked to the cafeteria, he proceeded to ask me what I did at the hospital, and when I told him that I worked in the lab, he asked what exactly I did. I informed him that I tested patients’ blood when they are sick. “Oh, so you do DNA testing and stuff like that?” he asked. I let out a quiet chuckle, and tried to tell him a little bit about what I do, but I could tell he didn’t really understand. As we walked I occasionally glanced at the young man who appeared to be fairly clean kept, with a small amount of facial hair, and dressed in an oversized polo shirt and loose jeans. He was very curious and genuinely interested in learning about me. He asked me if I had to go to school for my job, and I tried to explain to him that I went to Black Hills State University in Spearfish. He asked me where BHSU is, but when I told him it was on the west side of the state, he seemed puzzled. This young man had no understanding of directions. I asked him where he was from, and he told me he used to live in Mississippi. He also informed me that he wanted to go to the city in Minneapolis, but he continued on by saying that in order to get there he had to have money to buy a bus ticket and get a card. He seemed excited when he talked about moving to Minneapolis. We continued our conversation while we made our way to the cafeteria. Once at the cafeteria, he asked “What is all of this?” I pointed out the salad bar which usually contains well aged lettuce and other less-than-fresh toppings, the old pizza that sat in the warmer, the barely warm hot dogs rolling away, and we made our way to the meal buffet. Dinner on this particular evening was fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, over-cooked bacon and sausage, canned corn, and incredibly soggy looking hamburgers. I told him to grab whatever he liked. I was somewhat taken aback by the young man’s response. He enthusiastically exclaimed “Wow! You guys eat like kings!” What most people think of as a lousy hospital cafeteria, was a supreme buffet to him. His eyes lit up. He cautiously grabbed three or four pieces of fried chicken, some corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, and I cringed a little as he grabbed the clearly burnt bacon and sausage. He packed up his to go container, and I asked him if he’d like a soda and a bag of chips, to which he excitedly replied “Yes, please. Thanks so much.” While we walked through the cafeteria, he asked me some more questions that you might expect more from a 4th or 5th grader than someone who appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties. Some of the nurses looked at me and smiled, while others didn’t seem to pay us much attention. I paid for our meal, and we began the long walk back towards the lab and the place where I had found him sitting and reading his book. Along the way back, he asked me if I had any kids, and I told him that my wife is in school and that we had decided to wait until she graduated to consider having children. “That’s a good idea,” he replied. “I have one daughter, and I might have another daughter, but I don’t know if she’s mine for sure.” I paused for a second and asked him how old he was, to which he informed me that he was 20. Remembering that I worked in the lab and did “DNA testing” he asked if I knew how much DNA testing cost, because he wanted to know if he was the other girl’s dad or not. I told him that I did not know, but I would look into it for him. As we got closer to where I had originally found the young man, he looked at me with a peculiar glance. “Why’d you stop to talk to me and buy me food?” he curiously asked. “You don’t even know me,” he continued. I paused again, and replied “You looked like you needed a hand up.” He slowly responded by saying “Yeah, I feel like that sometimes, too.” If there was any other possible confirmation that I was making a difference in this young stranger’s life, this was it. In a mere 20 minutes, I had done more for a complete stranger, than I had done during the entire remainder of my day, all 23 hours and 40 minutes of it. “Today has been really weird,” he said. “People are doing really nice things for me. It’s strange, I feel like my life is changing.” “Change is a good thing, right?” I replied. The young man then continued to prove something that I had come to suspect with a single comment. “Yeah, it is, but sometimes it can be hard to cope with,” he quietly, slowly, and methodically said to me. Although this 20 year old young man had no sense of direction and could not tell me what states South Dakota touched, he was intelligent. He appeared to have the education of an elementary or middle school student, but he was able to grasp bigger concepts. He stumbled through the words of his book as he read out loud, but he understood how the idea of change can affect someone in many different ways. There was never a doubt in my mind that I had made the right move by meeting this young man and buying him a warm meal, I accomplished far more than just making buying a stranger dinner. As we neared the place where the young man was sitting before I took him to get some dinner, he repeatedly thanked me and introduced himself as Will. He asked if I worked tomorrow, and if I would find out how much a paternity test would be so he could find out if the second child was his daughter or not. I told him I would indeed be back. He gave me a firm handshake, and thanked me with a tone of sincerity in his voice that you don’t often hear. I then walked back to the lab as he sat down with his book, his backpack, and his dinner. The young man was no longer in the hallway when I finished work at 0500, and I will most likely never see him again. I went to lunch at the same time the following night, but I did not see the young man along the way. Regardless of whether I ever see him again, the 20 minutes that I spent with him not only made his day, but it also taught me something as well. I feel as though I did more than just make a stranger’s day by giving him someone to talk to and buying him a halfway decent meal. This polite, young man may have not been educated, but he was quite intelligent in his thoughts and the way he spoke. You could see the wheels turning when you looked him in the eye. Not only this, but the sincere appreciation and genuine interest in simply talking to me was astounding. I proved to this man that there are nice and helpful people in this world. More importantly, I believe I gave this young man hope. Hope that despite where he has been, wherever that may be, that there is a brighter future, and that even though we may not want to admit it, that we will find people to lend a helping hand along the way. And for me, this young man taught me a lesson that you won’t learn in any classroom or wrap your mind around while some speaker is giving a lecture, but a lesson that must be witnessed to understand and appreciate. Not only do we need to appreciate the little things in life, the warm meals even if they are from a lousy hospital cafeteria and the simple joys of decent conversation, but we need to understand the dramatic effects that taking 20 minutes out of your day to talk to a stranger can have on both their life and yours. You won’t just make their day, but you may even change their entire life. Please learn from my story. Do yourself a favor and take the time out of your “busy” day to make someone else’s. Make someone smile. Make a new friend. Make a difference. Make a change. Give someone HOPE.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 13:07:29 +0000
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