A man with a great heart
The following is a true story about an experience that happened to my family on July 7th when we were in Newfoundland.
It was too late to detour when two of my car’s right tires were broken by a pothole on Highway 91 en route to Cape St. Mary’s ecological reserve in Newfoundland. Tears broke out from my daughter Samantha’s eyes when she realized that we were stranded on the road. She desperately waved to a car passing by till it stopped. The driver, Gordon Collins, was a man around 60 years old and who lives in Mount Pearl. He realized what happened and told me the name of a car service shop 10 minutes down the road. As I had no telephone number for the service station, he voluntarily drove back there and gave me the phone number of another car repairman the store suggested. However, when I called and realized it was not possible for the car repairman to come, Gordon said, “I won’t leave you stranded on the road.”
He then helped me to change a spare tire to the back and spoke with another man passing by who voluntarily replaced my broken front tire with a used one, which eventually made me possible to drive back to St. John’s.
Gordon refused any cash I offered him for the big help. We were deeply touched by the very friendly Newfoundland people. “We’ve seen many beautiful things on this island: the whales, the birds, and the iceberg,” I told Samantha, “but what is the most beautiful is not the iceberg, it is the great heart of people here!”
John Huang Halifax