Foreigners in Motion

After grudgingly taking the Greyhound up to Montreal for Spring Break, I was desperate to find a rideshare for the way back. I posted my request on craigslist more than a week in advance and checked the rideshare forum at least twice a day to see if anyone was heading to Boston on St Patrick's Sunday. After a few days, I received this rather colorful message:

hi if you are willing to help me in gas confortable car please give me call 617 XXX XXXX thanks

So I called the number and spoke to a man with a Borat-esque accent who told me to name a price. I said I was accustomed to paying around $35 one way.

“Maybe when gas was $1.50," he cackled, "now it’s $3.50!”

Apparently I had named an outrageous price.

“Make it $40,” he continued, “and we’ll call it a deal.”

“Uh…ok” (I was tempted to bargain him down to $38 but thought I’d count my blessings).

This guy clearly meant business. I was a tad apprehensive about spending 5 to 6 hours in his car, no matter how “confortable” it was. But it turned out – as it always does – that he was a pretty cool guy.

Jamal immigrated to the States from Algeria in 1990 when he was 30-years-old. At 48, he has a wife and 15-year-old twins, and although he possesses an engineering degree and owns a renovation business, currently works as a cab driver to “pay the bills.”

Jamal is Berber and compared the linguistic tensions between Berbers and Arabs in Algeria to Quebec’s language politics. He also caught me up on centuries of Arabic Rae music; it's not bad, though I was half disappointed that Sting never showed up for a chorus.

Ridesharing is Caring

(photo from the creative commons)

Anonymity is one of the key tenets of craigslist. Normally, you don't get to see who's behind the "Reply to" address unless you ride with them, buy something from them, or meet them for a late-night "casual encounter."

But over the past few weeks, I've had the privilege of sitting down with a number of ridesharers under the immortal pretense of "journalism," putting a face and name to those dizzying-set-of-numbers@craigslist.org. Among them were:

• Padma, a 30-year-old electrical engineer from India.

• Katie, a 6-foot-plus ice hockey player and documentary film maker from Colorado

• Srin, a Newfoundland-born Pediatrics resident at Harvard

• Amber, a 22-year-old animal rights activist from Syracuse

• Bridget, a stand-up bass player (and stand-up gal) from Jersey
  

They all had different stories, backgrounds, destinations and rideshare expectations, but what they all seemed to have in common was a strong degree of trust. A trust in the basic good of (hu) man and a passion for connecting with people, transiently or not.

I like to think of this as the "backpacker mentality," although it is by no means the sole domain of the grungy traveler with a heap of canvas on her back.



For instance, last summer I joined an organization called Servas, a world-wide network of hosts who welcome travelers into their homes for a two-night cross-cultural exchange - for free. Most of my hosts were around my parents' age, and among them were doctors, teachers, engineers and psychologists.

Often they were people who had traveled when they were younger and were eager to expend some of the hospitality they'd received over the years.

They were people who hadn't lost the backpacker mentality- the spirit of trust and openness to whatever or whomever might come knocking.