what does a good Samaritan look like?

hey kids.

had a thoroughly enjoyable weekend, and as an added bonus went to the travel doctors and got hooked up with three vaccinations and a blood test. niiiicce! so that was fun, but on our journey back to the car park, me and neal (holla!) saw a couple of aisan ladies in a distressing parkig scenario? they had the real wheel right flush against the kerb nearly scrapping the hubcap, and the front tyre pointing towards the road at rather a large angle.

we walked past, stopped. did the, 'should we? nah, yeah? oh, i spose?'
neal bravely went back and initiated contact.
we tried the old, 'yeah, you've got plenty of room just keep coming forward' but that worked to no avail, so then the old. okay, go the other way back into the kerb, but they weren't really feeling that either, so neal saw an opportunity, one of those unspoken communications, which responded in the driver saying 'do you want to do it?'

once he got used to the dash shift auto whatever transmission he was away laughing and had them out of the their spot of bother in no time. he left the car pointing out to the road with the hazard lights on with plenty of room to manoeuvre.

so we patted ourselves on the back, said, 'thanks, see ya later'. and carried on our merry way.
it wasn't until after we got back to my car and were driving back down the road past them, that our moment of helpfulness was shattered, they were trying to get into a car park, not out of one.

heh, a brief laugh, but it bought forward some deeper issues, especially as we prepare to go to cambodia
if we don't assess the situation accurately, we could easily do more harm then good over there, and think that because its a western way of doing things, it must be the right way. i mean, in the above example all me and neal had to do was ask, 'are you trying to get out?' instead of just presuming and we could have fixed their dilemna.
if we had driven off the other way down the road, we would never have known that we didn't fix the problem and would have been patting ourselves on our backs all the way home.

anyway, just something to ponder.

take care cuzzies.

carl.