Wait, And Be Patient with Others

Sometimes problems are resolved simply by patiently waiting. Impatience can make the people who should or could help with the problem nervous. Patience creates empathy, or at least sympathy, and the desire to help.

Once in coming into Moscow from Uzbekistan without a Russian visa, I had no ticket to prove that I would be leaving in 72 hours and therefore eligible to enter on my Uzbekistan visa. My flight from Bukhara, a town on the Uzbekistan-Tadzhikistan border, to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan was smooth. In Tashkent, however, my plane to Moscow encountered technical difficulties, and it took me three days to reach Moscow. That meant I had to redo my ticket from Moscow to Houston, where I was living at the time. However, there is no Delta Airlines office anywhere in Uzbekistan, so the only possible way to redo the ticket was to have it changed in the computer at Sheremetovo II airport, from where I would depart Moscow for New York City. The unfortunate part of all this was that I was flying Transaero Airlines into Sheremetovo I, a different airport, located a few miles away from the one I would fly out of.

Upon arrival, I went to the transit point with the Uzbeks who were using Uzbekistan passports and airline tickets to pass through Moscow en route from one airport to another (Moscow has five airports). Everyone got through easily, except for me. My old ticket from Moscow to New York City, the required proof of departure, had expired the day before. The guard admitting the Uzbeks did not know what to do with me. So, he left to get his boss. I waited. (There was not much else I could do!)

When the boss returned, I patiently explained the whole story again to him. I did not act as if I were in a hurry. If they wanted to take all day, they could. I had no place special to be at any given time; my flight to New York was not until the next day. The boss allowed to the underling that I appeared to be trustworthy and that they might just let me through on my word.

"That's a grand idea," I said to him in Russian. He laughed and told me that I had yet another hurdle: passport control.

Off I went to passport control. There the guard frowned and asked how I had made it so far without a visa. I explained that the transit point guards had considered me harmless.

"Oh, then," he asked, "will they vouch for you?"

I had no idea what they would say. At the worst, I figured, I could always just wait until someone fixed the problem.

"Sure," I said with overt confidence although I was not sure at all.

It turned out not to be an issue; the guards vouched for me. I think they vouched for me because they liked the warm feeling they got from helping someone who was patient.