The people we have met – Exceptionally kind and generous

We were chatting around breakfast today about some of the people that we have met here; even people that we don’t know all that well. And we all acknowledged that they have been uniformly kind and generous. (Our only gripe has been with rickshaw and taxi drivers, who have consistently tried to scam us….described in earlier blog posts.)

There is one friend we had gotten together with a couple of times when we first arrived in India. When Adam and I were in the hospital in the summer, there was some glitch with recognition of our international health insurance, and the hospital would not “release” us until payment had been made. They also didn’t take American Express. (Note that the entire bill for two of us in hospital for 5 days or so was only about $2000, in a private hospital.) While Amnon was trying to resolve payment through our Cigna insurance, this friend heard that we were still in the hospital. Without telling us, he left work and came to the hospital, stopping at an ATM to take out $2000 along the way. By the time he arrived, the insurance issue had been resolved, but this struck us as an exceptionally, unusually generous gesture.

When Adam and I were in the hospital, my colleagues at work stopped by to see us almost daily, just to see how we were. I had only been at work for a couple of weeks at this time, so we were really just acquaintances…I thought this was a lovely gesture on their part.

We were (as mentioned in earlier posts) looking to buy a van for weeks and weeks. An acquaintance from an electronics store where Amnon had made purchases and had had some repairs done heard about this. He volunteered to lend Amnon his car for a few days to facilitate our car search (while *he* traveled on his motorcycle, instead.)

Jordan, Adam, and Jesse went to a local club for “open mike” night. As it turned out, open mike was the following weekend, and there was actually a professional band playing that night. When the band realized that that boys had intended to play in the open mike, they offered instead to have the boys come up and play a few numbers using their equipment, set up on stage. The boys talked over breakfast about how bands in the US would be much more protective of their equipment, which is an interesting conundrum, since replacing equipment in the US is probably less financially daunting than it is for an Indian band.