Uber had crashed, and her toddler needed to get to the emergency room.
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Daniel de Oliveira Torres, 33, from the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, started working this November as an Uber driver to supplement his family income, while also working in car cleaning and as a grocery stocker in a supermarket.
Recently, a woman using the application needed his help just at a time when the system failed. The driver then decided to locate her house manually, and when he found out what the situation was, he chose not to charge anything for the ride.
“She was terrified on the phone because her daughter had a fever of 104ºF and needed to go to the nearest Emergency Room,” Daniel told Raquel Derevecki of Sempre Familia. “When I heard that, I became extremely concerned as well, and asked her to explain her location on the phone, because I was going there.”
Upon arrival, Daniel saw the mother, Bruna Silva Santos, looking very worried with her 3-year-old daughter in her arms. He helped them get into the car and hurriedly left for the nearest Emergency Room (ER).
“I drove off honking and with a siren on, as if I were an ambulance. I was as worried as she was, especially when the girl started vomiting a lot on her mother and in the car,” Daniel told Derevecki.
Daniel is the father of three children, and simply put himself in the place of his passenger. In statements to the Sempre Família website, Bruna said that the young man’s efforts to locate her home manually in order to take her daughter to the hospital had already made her feel thankful and moved; but he would go even further.
“When Leticia started vomiting, I asked him to stop the car so as not to get it dirty, but the driver told me to forget about the vehicle, because we needed to help my daughter,” Bruna told Sempre Familia. “And when we arrived at the hospital, I offered to pay extra for his service and to help with cleaning, but he said he wouldn’t charge anything.”
And he did even more: besides not accepting the payment, he parked in front of the ER for almost three hours, until Bruna and the little girl left the hospital.
“We returned home around one in the morning and I made sure to publish what happened on my Facebook wall, in order to thank him publicly,” Bruna says.
Since it was published on November 6, the post has been shared more than 55,000 times and has 187,000 likes.
Bruna summarizes:
“You can still believe in this world … He was an angel of God in my life.”
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