Angels

My sister and my dad did the Camino de Santiago, an 800 km-long pilgrimage from South of France to North of Spain that finally reaches Santiago de Compostela. Thousands of people walk it every year and none of them comes home without having had a great experience. It is said that during the Camino you meet angels. They can be people who warn you when you mistake the direction, or help you find a shelter when the hostel is full and so on. I believe that angels are around us all the time, but only sometimes we realize that they are there.

Some days ago I found myself in the horrific situation of having little cash and my bankcard wouldn’t work! I was not in Kovalam (the city where I’m volunteering) and my only source of money was that card. I tried calling my bank but it was 5 am there, so I didn’t get any reply. In such a bad situation, I met several angels.

The people of the hotel where I had to check out agreed to take only 2/3 of the money and even lent me enough cash to come back to Kovalam. The founder of the school where I’m volunteering, who I called in total panic, answered the phone at 8am and calmed me down. At the ATM I met an Indian girl who also had issues withdrawing money; so she took me with her to several ATMs. When she finally managed to withdraw money but not me (because it was a problem of my bank) she left me her number and told me to call her should I need anything. I’m sure that if I had needed to sleep somewhere she would have hosted me, a total stranger! Finally my sister, who woke up at 5am to help me, managed to find a map of all the ATMs around me and then solved the problem calling the bank again.

I was so lucky to have so many angels around me! I then asked myself: Would I do the same, if I saw a girl in trouble? To be honest, I don’t know. But, this situation reminded me of something that happened to me last year.

I was living in London, in an area with a high concentration of Jews. There, from Friday’s sunset to Saturday’s sunset most shops and restaurants close because it is the Jewish Sabbath. During Sabbath Jews cannot do any work or any action. They pray and eat food that was prepared the day before. Apparently they cannot even touch the buttons of the elevator.

Well, one Friday evening I was coming back from work and in a secondary street nearby my house, a Jew guy stopped me. He told me that his radiator broke down and was doing an annoying loud noise. He wanted to switch it off but that would have required an action, which he couldn’t do because of his religion, so he asked me if I could go to his house and turn the radiator off for him.

At first I refused, I was a single girl willingly going into the house of a stranger guy, I could already see the newspaper titles “Girl killed in quiet neighbourhood”.. Then the guy assured me that he was married and didn’t intend anything bad. So I decided to go, if I really had to die, at least I would have died thinking of doing something good! Luckily, all there was was a broken radiator and all I had to do was turn a handle down to zero.

When I left, the guy thanked me and said something like “God will give you something good for what you did today”. Maybe 4 angels in India was the answer?! It is really true: what goes around, comes around!