Something happened to me that reminded me why years ago we chose to be “new people” for a United World.

I was in a hospital. I caught sight of a young man who was crying alone, away from his group. He was studying to become an operating theatre and was in his final year, just three months from graduation.

I approached him. He told me that his father had lost his job. He used to go to college on his brother’s old bicycle, which had finally broken down. So he had to take four buses a day and no longer had the money for the fares.“I’m going to give up. I can’t go on any longer ,” he told me.

I wanted to give him money to top up his bus pass and get home. He didn’t want to accept. He agreed on one condition: that I give him my number so he could pay me back. He kept to his promise. Three days later he gave me that money back, but at the same time he confirmed the worst: he would interrupt his studies until circumstances allowed him to resume them.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. His face was constantly in my thoughts. I thought about how many young people like him were just one step away from giving up, ready to abandon everything.

Two days later, I was offered some unexpected extra work. The exact amount I needed. And a clear thought occurred to me, the kind that you don’t question: “What if God has sent this opportunity to me exactly for him?”

I didn’t hesitate. I gave him what he needed for three months of bus tickets and to finish his studies. That day, I heard nothing from him.

He called me 48 hours later. He could not speak. He was crying. Crying in the way you cry when hope is given back to you.

Then two years passed without any further news from him. Until one day I received a message from an unknown number. It was a photograph: his graduation as an operating-room nurse.

It was accompanied by a sentence: “I partly owe this diploma to a stranger who helped me without even knowing who I was”.

I was deeply moved. I cried with joy. I cried because I understood one thing:

A United World is not built with speeches. It is built with a bus ticket, with a repaired bicycle, with a hand held out outstretched without asking for a surname.

In fact, that young man never knew mine.

What matters is that, for 90 days, he was able to continue his studies. And that today there is one more operating-room nurse in the hospitals, saving human lives, because someone believed in him when he could no longer believe in himself.

Sometimes we think that changing the world requires doing something extraordinary,

when in fact the world changes because someone is able to take four buses.

I am sharing this not for my own sake, but because we need to remind ourselves that what we do may not be visible to us—and may perhaps only blossom two years later in the form of a qualification, a life, or hope.

Let us continue to be those “strangers” who lend a helping hand.

Tito Ruiz Diaz (Paraguay)

Photo © Alialcantara-Pexels