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Human Values

by Dorel Jurcovan

This article can be freely copied to be published

Human values are probably the element that impressed me the most in Portland.  As a child I spent my summer holidays in a village in the Carpathian Mountains and everyone greeted you on the streets.  In 1990 I went in Norway and there I met extremely friendly people.  Portland is for me part of the same oasis of human spiritual beauty.

Is it the same in our city?  After one month in Portland, at my return to Timisoara, quite obviously I told everyone how Portland is.  Some of my stories raised an interest mingled with almost distrust and commentaries like: “I’ve heard about it” or “someone told me about it”.  What was so unusual?  I will tell you some of my experiences and you, that live in Timisoara, could tell me if this is what happens to you every day.

In Portland the smile is present everywhere, in shops, on the halls of buildings, in the elevator.  The smile is always accompanied by the standard question: “How are you?”.  If you are on a street and your eyes cross with the eyes of an unknown person, very probably the guy will smile at you, and if you are close enough will ask you how you are.

In Portland the pedestrian is the king of the road.  If you are on the sidewalk at the corner of a street and you head to the curb all the cars freeze.  And it not only the cars on your side, but even the ones that come from the opposite direction; they literally freeze before getting into the crossing, to leave room for the cars that come from the perpendicular direction while you cross.  And they take care that not one inch of their car is on the zebra.  On my first day in Portland I stepped on the zebra when a car already got to about half of it.  Obviously it froze where it was.  I thought impolite to cross and I said, let him pass, and I motioned him to go.  The driver looked at me, put the car in reverse, drove backwards the car completely out of the zebra and waited patiently until I got on the other side of the street.  What is really rude is to stop on the zebra for a chat, blocking the traffic.  Once, without noticing, I did that for several seconds.  My surprise was that no one honked the horn, no one swore, showed me the finger, revved the car like a dart past me driving on my shoe-tips or wiping the dust on the side of the car with my cloths, not even the slightest sign of dissatisfaction.

Let me tell you a short story.  One of the days in Portland my wife and me headed home and we passed a restaurant, with tables on the sidewalk.  At a table there were two very merry guys.  One of them tells me “I see you made some shopping.  Do you live in the neighborhood?”.  “No”, I replied, “we are from Romania”.  The two of them, David and Mathew, were very much willing to find out more about us, they do not meet everyday someone from Romania.  We were in a hurry, but we decided to spend some minutes with them.  The two guys have a business and they celebrated the opening of a new branch of their business.  They invited us to join them, ordered the best Italian wine available and wanted to buy us lunch, but we had to refuse, we were in a hurry.  Actually we spend much more time with them than what we planned, and we departed like lifetime friends.

And a final story.  Nine years ago I flew for the first time in Portland and I had to continue my trip to Corvallis.  Unfortunately the custom formalities took longer than I expected and I discovered that I have only 10 minutes to my bus to Corvallis.  I ran to the bus station, but because of some construction works I had to take a shuttle to my bus.  The shuttle arrived, I got on it and I saw that we went rather far away from the airport.  I asked the driver, is the bus station far.  And, like in the joke with the guy from Transylvania the guy replied “Now it is far”, meaning I got into the wrong shuttle and I was rather away from my destination.  The shuttle took the people to a huge parking lot, to recover their parked cars.  I already considered that I have a lost cause, but not the others in the shuttle.  The other passengers made an ad hoc crisis committee, everyone trying to come up with something.  The driver made a phone call, spoke with the dispatcher(?!), telling them to delay the departure of my bus as much as possible.  At the first stop of the shuttle, one of the passengers told me “come with me, I will drive you there”.  I threw my two pieces of heavy luggage into his car and he drove me like a madman to the bus station (at that time I haven’t realized the favor he was doing to me in a society that doesn’t break the traffic law).  When we got to the bus station, my friend shouted at me “run and tell them you are here”.  I hesitated, I am ashamed to say, how is that, I leave my luggage with someone I saw for the first time in my life?  But I took the chance and I ran anyway as hard as I could to the bus; the driver of it and the passengers waiting outside met me with smiles and words of encouragements that I succeeded to come, everyone was happy to see me.  And while I tried to recover my breath I saw my voluntary driver running to me, swaying under the weight of my luggage.  I know that in that moment I was really very much ashamed, how could I have nurtured in my mind even a shadow of a doubt that he could have disappeared with my luggage?  Even today I very much regret that I haven’t asked the name and address of my benefactor, to be able to thank him.

I’ve heard comments, of course the Americans are polite, because the society works well and everyone has not so many problems.  It could be that the cause-effect could be on the other way round.  You go to the bank or a public service and you smile to the clerk and she smiles back at you.  When you discuss with her you think of the problems of the person in front of you, at the work that could be boring, how busy she is and that she cannot answer you immediately to everything you have to solve.  In exchange you receive a much better service.  At your job the boss smiles at you, praises when you do something good, understands you (sometimes) when you have problems, and in return you do everything humanly possible to do a good job.  In fact, I believe that because people are polite and kind the society works well and not because the society functions well people are polite.

Dorel Jurcovan

July 10, 2007