AUGUST 24, THURSDAY

KINDLINESS IN MONTEVIDEO

After sleeping for 6 hours I woke up and for some reason was suddenly aware of kindliness in Montevideo, which is probably the thing that I will most remember about yesterday and about this trip.

It started when Gabriel decided to take me under his wing in the Montevideo airport and to put my baggage on his cart and to take me to the van where his friend was picking him up and then drove me to my Airbnb and carried my bags up the pedestrian street to my apartment. He insisted on giving me his number and, coincidentally, called me up ten minutes ago to say that he was in town and asked if there was anything he could do for me, if there was, just to call him. We only met in the customs line as we were leaving the airport and he considers me a friend.

Then I got Covid in a strange city with no idea how to proceed. In this case the owner of the Airbnb, Daina, living in Toronto, Canada for the summer took me under her wing and called the British Hospital to see if I could get an appointment and then some private medical service to see if a doctor could make a house visit and prescribe me Paxlovid. None of that seemed worth doing and she saved me hundreds of dollars through the advice of the second doctor not to do anything and just to wait it out since Paxlovid was not available. Then she went further and got neighbors down the hall to bring me food and aspirin until I could get out on my own. I haven’t met them yet, but have had the warm feeling that they were taking care of me stays with me.

The third act of kindliness was when I visited the official Information office near the Mercado del Puerto and a very nice woman spent an entire hour giving me advice on museums and restaurants and how to get to the airport and how to visit Punte del Este and how to get to Buenos Aires at the end of my trip. She made a number of long phone calls to answer my questions about how to travel and how to deal with luggage. She didn’t have to spend so much time and could have answered briefly, but she didn’t.

And finally yesterday at the Customs office not one, but two people, simply out of the goodness of their hearts took me under their wing and guided me from office to office and refused to be paid anything at all although their official function as customs brokers was to get paid guiding other people’s goods through customs.

The second customs broker, Miguel, who let me take his photograph said that he had been helped many times in the United States and that then he had been told that the way he could pay people back was to help someone else. He was helping me, and now it is up to me to help someone else who is as clueless as I so apparently was.

The friendliness of people on the street who have given me directions, the two women who saw my weariness and gave me their seats on the bus, the helpful man who said to follow him and put me on the right bus and then held my coffee cup when I sprayed coffee everywhere were other people who were kind to me. When I turned around in the empty bus to thank him he was gone.

So this is how I will think of Montevideo and why I like making my way on my own, even at 86, as awkward as it can be, which I will write about tomorrow.