THOSE ANGELIC CHILDREN

Two children still giving off the smell of infant formula diet have delivered an edifying, or a little shaming, message to a world of incremental imperfections. The beauty and appeal of what they did lay in the sheer range of their imagination, spontaneity of their fellow-feeling and giving utterances to unvarnished truths.

A Palestinian child of five or six toddling across the ashes of Israeli carnage in Gaza proclaims, “I am a journalist” to Swedish media man Johan Mathies. By one broad stroke of imagination the child personified abhorrence against the ruthless Zionist persecution killing off non-combatants, that too mostly women and children.
The kid braved it all, possibly, a lone survivor in his family, held up an identity of a journalist hoping that it could give him a modicum of freedom to move, even perhaps protection. His instinct told him to keep in the company of a foreign journalist. He must have seen with wide–eyed adoration how journalists put their lives on line to cover events in hostile circumstances. Themselves an endangered species they do not cower to photograph the rubble and the dead, or maimed bodies left by the massacre.

To look authentic the boy wore a fake jacket made of a black polythene sheet. The AFP report which featured the story did not name the boy, presumably out of concern for his security.

Such a glimmer of a five-year old's display of sparkling, witty courage and the humane story the Swedish journalist wove around it put in perspective the victimisation of children as a tool of ethnic cleansing. For, all this conjures up the macabre snapshots of children groaning in pangs of severe injuries, even partial decapitation. And the muted world has been a bystander to the wrapped up dead bodies held tight in the arms of an adult, not necessarily one of their parents, being carried through the mounds of wreckages.

One Israeli woman said to BBC that her list of casualties included 1 to 67 year-olds which means in her own words that whole families were killed. She had collected the names and translated them in Hebrew to catch Israeli attention, and by implication, try to nudge stone-deaf unconscionable Netanyahu into returning to status quo-ante in the very least.

Our second actor in the cast is 11-year old Liang Eiawei from Shenzhen province. Cancer –afflicted Liang, dying after long suffering had ensured that his ennobling last wish would be carried out. He expressed the desire to his mother before dying that his limbs be donated for use by those who had none. His mother donated his priceless gifts to the Red Cross which promptly issued a certified recognition of the child's great humanitarian gesture.
His teachers think that the boy may have been inspired by reading a story from a school textbook. The moral of the story is that the dead child's limbs will not only enable the disabled to function but also perpetuate the donor's memory.

The child hero appended a statement to his deed: “There are many great men and women in the world who accomplished great things. I too, want to be a great child.”

His small life's work is a testament to a clarion call to humanity to do what lies in one's power to do even when approaching death.
 

The writer is Associate Editor, The Daily Star.