Today you, tomorrow me

Earlier this year, I lived in Guatemala studying Spanish, climbing volcanos and motorcycling around. At one point a friend of mine visited me from Mexico for a couple weeks and we decided we'd rent a car and drive around the country. It's much safer than the busses, and way more freedom.

We were going between villages in the mountains that were -- to say the least -- rural. Most of them probably had thirty or forty people living in them and the only access was a single-lane dirt road barely passable by even four-wheel drive vehicles. The workers in the villages rely on hitchhiking or private "taxis" to get to work. Those with trucks generally pick up anyone on the side of the road who's going in the same direction and flags them down.

Having been the hiker myself on some similar Guatemalan roads previously, I discovered that it's customary to ask the driver how much you owed them for the trip at the end and then pay them (depending on the length of the trip) maybe 5 or 10 quetzales -- I think at the time that was about $1.00 - $1.20 USD or so.

My friend and I got in the habit of picking up everyone we saw and dropping them off at their location; por gratis. Most of them didn't speak Spanish (this was rural enough that nearly everyone spoke some mayan dialect) so it was always a bit of a silly experiment trying to explain that I didn't them to pay.

I like to think that maybe we made a couple people's days and they were able to put a little more food on their table (or heck, beer in their belly).

More generally, I make a point to pick up hitchhikers when I have time -- which sadly is less and less frequent these days. Even if it's a risky proposal, I've been on the other side of the equation one too many times in my life not to try and return the favor.

In Malaysia, many cases where ppl stopped to help but end up having their cars and money robbed!

I don’t think there is any. I’m kind of ok with it, though, because this kind of off-topic story is rather rare as far as I remember.

I liked the story.

I don't know about other software developers / hacker-types, but personally I'm very grumpy and cynical at times. I get very circumspect when making friends or responding to other people's requests for help.

Maybe this is not related to Hackers, but I get the feeling that software developers can become very anti-social. I blame it on the long hours of work in isolation, or the analytically oriented thinking we are capable of (which I view as a job related problem at times, like burnout, because I can't switch it on and off as much as I'd like to).

For some reason, half way through this great story I suddenly found myself contrasting it with that less great story that did the rounds last July 4: the Sun-Times' Terry Savage's "There is no free lemonade" (original article expired probably with good reason, but here's a copy I found: http://bit.ly/eqIMNe) wherein author recounts her horror at finding a lemonade stand manned by two girls giving away their product for free. Despite attempts to instill an entrepreneurial spirit into the fledgling tycoons - on that day of all days - they still refuse to charge for it, whereupon she drives away disgusted and thirsty.

Is $15 for a gas can unreasonable when there is quite clearly a market? In theory a $20 labour and parts charge handed to the poor Mexican family should make both parties happy and the economy stronger (barring somewhat awkward questions of tax, right to work etc). In practice the removal of money from a human transaction created an intangible wealth, a bonding of strangers and a transfer of values that has travelled far beyond that stretch of tarmac.