Seven years ago, a college freshman named Joey Romano was lying in a ditch with a broken wrist after swerving on his skateboard to avoid a car near the University of Texas at Austin. With no family nearby and little insurance, he made an unusual choice: instead of an ambulance, he called an Uber.
That call would change his life.
When driver Beni Lukumu arrived, Romano was still on the ground. Lukumu carefully helped him into the car, reclining the seat to ease his pain. The plan was a quick trip to urgent care, but Romano’s injury was too serious, and he was sent to the ER.
Lukumu, who had immigrated from the Congo at age 25, knew what it felt like to be far from loved ones. When he learned Romano had no one nearby, he stayed. “It wasn’t even a question for me,” Lukumu says. “I was staying with Joey. He needed somebody to be by his side.”
From 2 to 8 p.m., Lukumu signed him into the ER and sat with him the whole time. The hours of lost work didn’t matter. “I was on a morphine drip and I remember feeling glad he was there,” Romano recalls. “He has this warm presence, and strangely, it felt like we had known each other forever.”
Romano’s grandmother arrived as he was being discharged and offered Lukumu payment. He refused, but joined them for dinner, the beginning of a friendship that has lasted ever since.
It came at just the right moment. Romano had been weighed down by grief since losing his little brother Johnny to leukemia at age 10.
“After losing my brother… I just shut down and closed myself off. I became really cold,” he says. But Lukumu’s kindness pulled him out of that dark place. “That one act of kindness helped me see the good in the world again,” Romano says. “Beni absolutely changed my life.”
Today, Romano is a renewable energy developer, and Lukumu, an accomplished gospel singer, works in insurance. They still check in on each other a couple of times a year.
For Lukumu, the lesson is simple: “The world is so divided right now. What we need is love and kindness.”
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