(480) Do not talk to Strangers

When I was young, very few parents in my country own private vehicles. I used to walk, take public or school buses to and from schools. My mother's golden rule is: Do not talk to strangers. Who are the strangers? The people who were waiting at the bus stop. The bus drivers whom we see day in day out. The bus conductors and pedestrians that go out onto the main roads at the same time in the morning.

This is forty years later. I still teach all my children the same rule. Does this rule apply to a middle age woman? What do you think?

There is a neighbour who takes taxi often. She takes the long distance bus to a far away city often due to work. Sometimes she leaves early at sunrise, other times she comes back after mid-night. There is no way she could take the city bus as those times were out of the normal schedule. Once she decided to take a specific radio taxi, another neighbour advised her not to be too friendly to the male driver. I actually told her that I would not want such a person to know too much about me.

This is like a year or so later. She herself is getting nervous as the taxi driver started to ask her out. Just the other day he even asked her for a loan. She feels very unsafe as he knows where she lives and he has her hand phone number.

"A stranger" may be a person we see regularly but know little about. He lives from the periphery in the darkness. We live in the light. It is easy for them to find us. If too much information falls into their hands, we are then afraid that they would use it to harm us. So it is by far safer to keep strangers at arm's length.