The Help

This title is inspired by the New York Times best seller book called “The Help”, which I read couple months ago. Actually, I did not read it but listened to an audible book on my kindle which was for 18 hours! As much as I liked the book and am eager to watch the movie, this blog has nothing to do with the book. This is about the helps that have come to me miraculously and have made me believe that angels are with us, right here, on planet earth. I believe that angels turn up when you are away from your beloved ones, and there is nobody else that you can turn to, when you are distressed to restore your faith in the world.

I was in high school, when few things triggered sadness in my life. I was away from my family and although I could turn to some people for help, I did not find the courage to do so. I was young and scared, I felt like I had lost my way. To make things worse, the friend who has promised to take me out so that I felt better, got stuck due to some unforeseen commitment that he had never signed up for. I found myself standing in the middle of a market square, my eyes blurry with tears and my head pounding with fear of the unknown. Moments before my tears would start rolling down my cheeks, a middle aged man in a neatly ironed white shirt and a pair of black trousers approached in my direction. He came to me and asked about a rose stall nearby, “Do you know if those roses are real?” I looked back and saw that the stall had clearly printed letters saying “wooden roses, 12 for a pound.” So I repeated those words to the man and he left. Since Valentine’s Day was coming soon I assumed he was buying roses in advance for his wife. Seconds later, just when I was about to leave, he came back with a bouquet of roses and gave it to me. It was pure magic. My misery disappeared as suddenly quickly as did that man, since a second later he was nowhere to be seen. But I felt an ocean of peace pouring into my heart.

A similar incident happened on my flight to NY (from Atlanta) during my sophomore year in college. Since Atlanta has one of the busiest and perhaps the most disorganized airport, taking a cheap flight makes it worse. My morning flight was delayed four times, making it an evening flight of 7 PM. It was already late night when I reached NY. Although I had been to NY a few times before, it was the first time on my own. To my dismay, I somehow lost the address of the place where I needed to be for a dinner event. As I struggled to understand the direction given to me through phone by friends who were already at the destination, nothing made sense to me as I was not at all used to the NYC transit system, uptown and downtown were confusing concepts, when I was not explained that uptown simply meant increasing street number and downtown decreasing street number. Luckily, this passenger on my flight offered to talk to my friend and get the address on my behalf so that he could make a pictorial map to my destination. In addition, he also offered to share a taxi ride to the nearest subway station, as he said that he was headed in the same direction. I shall forever be thankful to the angel who helped me reach my destination safely when I was lost and frightful in the dark of the unknown city

Post college, I chose the unconventional road. Despite an offer for graduate school, I decided to take a leap to gain some work experience in Bangkok, Thailand. Among all the challenges, language barrier seemed the greatest one and the hardest one to overcome, as I never seem to find time or motivation to learn the local language. The fact that most of the staff in my section are foreigners and the local staff have their own small group, does not help much with learning the local culture and lifestyle. Once again, my fate found me an angel. I was coming back from work one day, hungry and tired when the sight of a little girl playing in the lobby of my apartment building caught my attention. I went forward to talk to her and ended up talking to her father. One day, he just came to me and offered to take me around with his family on weekends. Whether I hung out with them or not did not matter but what touched me most was his offer to include me in his family holidays when I was just a stranger to him.

Many more incidences like these have happened and helped me with my journey in life for which I am forever grateful. When I share them with my mom, she says that she prays every day for me from Nepal. She asks God to look out for me because she is not around and it seems that God has been listening to her. Looking after and being helped is expected from friends but when strangers step in unexpectedly that’s what I call “the help from angels” and I hope that this world is filled with many of them for everyone who has challenged their comfort zone to get inspired and explore the world.