Gerardo, a lawyer who has been named by the new president to investigate the old dictatorship's abuses, invites Roberto, a sympathetic stranger, to spend the night.

Rallies have drawn together these families, sympathetic strangers and others with their own agendas.

I believe it would be very helpful if she would talk about it, and sometimes it's easier to talk to a sympathetic stranger.

She looked up; she saw a sympathetic stranger looking down at her.

And, I promise you, the very act of writing out your problem becomes the first step to solving it, whether you forward the letter on to a sympathetic stranger or not.

Donations from former parishioners, graduates of the church's elementary school, other churches and sympathetic strangers have poured in from across the city, the region and the world.

The other travelers stayed with friends or politically sympathetic strangers.

"The problem could be that the drain pipes are not properly vented," she wrote, providing one of many responses the Virginia woman received from sympathetic strangers scattered across the country.

Entering her ninth month of pregnancy, she became so hysterical, she told me, that some sympathetic strangers in Karachi bought her a plane ticket home.

The riders spread out into the dark, alive city, bound for the apartments of friends or politically sympathetic strangers.