We’ve all heard of road rage, but how about road compassion?
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This wonderful story took place in Manaus, in the Amazon region of northern Brazil.
Fabiano Ladislau, 27 years old, was driving to work when he saw that an elderly man driving a car had just struck a motorcycle. Fabiano immediately began to record a video with his phone, because, as he told Brazilian website Sempre Familia, “I thought that the motorcyclist was going to get in fight with him. The young man with the motorcycle was still on the ground, and the elderly man got out of his car full of anguish, with his hands on his head. I was really worried about what might happen.”
But the scene he ended up recording was much different than anything he had seen before in traffic.
“The young guy got up and hugged the old man.” In the video, you can see the young man kiss the old man on the cheek as he embraces him. “Then,” Fabiano continued, “the elderly man began to ask forgiveness and began to cry.”
The two moved their vehicles off the road, and Fabiano made it a point to praise the biker.
“I rolled my window down and congratulated him. He told me that he’d lost his father when he was only 8 years old, and so he gave great value to older people. And since he was crying when he said it, I got emotional too.”
Fabiano shared the video with his friends through the chat app WhatsApp. It didn’t take long for the images to go viral. They were shared by a local newspaper, and then circulated through social networks. and to move thousands of other people as well. Here are translations of a couple of the comments in Portuguese from people on the internet who commented on the video, shared by the newspaper Manaus Alerta on Instagram:
“I thought this kind of thing didn’t exist anymore.”
“This made me cry.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B2y982ZArHs/
The names of the men involved in the accident weren’t published. Their actions, though, said everything that needed to be said.
Fabiano, who recorded the video, is married, with three daughters and a fourth child on the way. He believes that the scene he witnessed brings hope, “principally for those who, like me, do whatever is possible to transmit those values to our children. In the end, we have to respect and love everybody.”
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