The infant is safe, he will not be among the 15,000 children under five years of age who are dying everyday of poverty and curable diseases, according to UNICEF.
• Another African child, in this case Algerian, has lost a mother, much too soon. She left without hearing the baby babble the sacred syllable and word; the first words that every human attempts to utter: “Ma, ma; mama.”
This unjust and egoistic world, in which power and wealth reign, at the cost of the pain of millions, of orphaned babies and disconsolate mothers, this world left another innocent child without a mother.
Doubly touching, the news arrived via Tele Pinar, this time from the very location of the event: the province of Ouargla, in southern Algeria, more than 9,200 kilometers from Pinar del Rio, the home of the “foreigner” who saved the life of the unfortunate infant. By some strange mental association, when I learned what had happened, the memory of a name came to me: Angiel, another angel abandoned 12 years ago, under the rubble, one dark night in Haiti.
They say that the earthquake leveled Angiel’s dilapidated home, and the little one, without the slightest notion of what was going on, crawled through the darkness, until she felt something delicate and warm; she waited instinctively there until dawn; it was the arm of her mother, lying under the rubble.
Amidst the tragedy, the girl saw some “foreigners” crying. They brought relief and saved her. Those who came to her aid, like the Pinar del Rio nurse José Alberto Oliva in Algeria, belong to the same “army,” Cubans in white coats, who the rabid merchants of hate call “slaves.”
The mother of the innocent African child died from COVID-19, and the infant had contracted the disease. José Alberto, along with other Cuban colleagues, helped save the baby’s life, using a method they call “skin to skin, or kangaroo.” The image says more than a thousand words. There is José Alberto, with the little one held tight to his chest, calming him and providing the human warmth the pandemic had so cruelly denied the baby.
The infant is safe, he will not be among the 15,000 children under five years of age who are dying everyday of poverty and curable diseases, according to UNICEF.
The innocent one, and thousands like him, is alive and will live because thousands of Cubans are walking the world, taking leaps of love, higher and more beautiful than those of a kangaroo, to preserve life.
(Source: Granma)