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Abel The Street Boy
by Edna Yaghi
My older stronger brother is
called Cain. You might remember hearing about him from eons
past at a time when there was more good than evil in the
world. My name is Abel and this is my story.
I am a 10-year-old Iraqi street
boy. I make my living selling gum and begging on the streets
of Baghdad. Beggars do not do well these days as the majority
of the people are worse off than poor, they are desperate and
have no where to go and no one to turn to. Rumor has it that
the smart and wealthy Iraqis have long ago fled the country,
leaving behind the ruins of a once great nation.
Before I was old enough to
remember, the Americans bombed my country during the war
Westerners fondly labeled "Desert Storm." This year,
during the Holy month of Ramadan and not too long before
Christian Iraqis celebrated Christmas, the Americans again
bombed us. I am old enough now to remember how destructive and
terrible bombing is. Believe me, it is the worst form of
terror and there is simply no refuge from a bomb. Ask my
father, for it was an American bomb that took his life.
I don’t remember my father. He
was killed during Desert Storm. He was a professor of English
Literature at the University of Baghdad and as my mother tells
us, used to quote Shakespeare, especially Macbeth, the eve all
this madness began. But our tomorrows and tomorrows and
tomorrows have come and brought us nothing but death, disease
and despair.
I am considered one of the
"lucky ones." I have eaten enough garbage and drunk
enough sewage-polluted water to give me resistance to simple
germs. You see, children like me, 5,000 to 6,000 a month, die
from a variety of ailments and only the strongest survive.
After all, we have neither medicine nor adequate health
facilities to treat animals, much less humans.
Sometimes I feel I am not so
lucky to be alive after all. I am forced to spend most of my
time out on the street begging for a few pennies that I take
home to my mother at the end of the day. It is winter and the
wind on the streets of Baghdad goes through my young bones.
Other street boys like me, some of them orphans too, gather
together and build a bonfire to warm our hands and bodies. But
nothing warms our hearts. Our childhood is denied us.
Everywhere I look, I see ragged mothers carrying ragged
starving sick babies with sores seeping all over on their tiny
hands and faces and I wonder if this is the way things are
supposed to be. My older brother Cain says it is. He says that
might is right and that power once it falls into the hands of
the wicked, knows no justice and certainly no mercy. Cain
should know for he has much experience in such matters.
I, like many Iraqi children my
age, do not go to school. I stop cars and try to beg a penny
or two from drivers that look little better off than myself.
"Please sir, have a penny to spare for a boy who has to
support his family. My mother is sick and unable to beg and my
sister has diabetes."
Sometimes I feel a cold penny
plunk into my frozen hand and if I am terribly hungry, I take
a few more pennies and try to buy a stale sandwich. You know
the kind, the bread that has little green spots growing all
over it. But sometimes my stomach hurts so bad from hunger
pangs, I will eat nearly anything. Fasting teaches the full in
Ramadan really nothing like what the starving already know.
And Cain tells me there are so many full people in the world.
Full, happy stomachs sitting around warm fireplaces. A
fireplace where children can dream of what new excitement
tomorrow will bring. My tomorrows have come and gone and I am
only 10. My evenings are filled with nightmares and I have
come to determine that peaceful dreams are dreamt and owned
only by the prosperous.
Meanwhile, there are almost
daily clashes between American planes and Iraqi forces. Each
boom makes me shudder and my future is more uncertain than
ever.
But Cain is happier than I have
ever seen him. Some inner sense of scenes replayed an infinite
number of times gives me the feeling that he is trying to kill
me.
On a cold night while fellow
street kids and me try to keep warm over a few wooden matches,
I just might welcome the vision of my father opening up his
loving arms, inviting me to a world where there are no Cains,
no war, no hate.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001 Edna Yaghi
by the same author:
Reproduction in whole or
in part without permission is prohibited.
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