My daughter loved her presents and we spent a half hour chatting and laughing, with my two sons joining the impromptu party. I slipped a Lebanese 10 000-pound note, about six dollars, into his bloodstained hand and left. I went to Mahmoud and told him in my faltering Arabic that he was going to be okay and that everything would be fine. They did a physical exam, looked at his lacerated lips, rolled in the ultrasonography machine so that they could check for internal bleeding and started ordering x-rays. He wasn’t a Syrian refugee anymore he wasn’t one of 1.2 million in Lebanon he wasn’t a street kid he was a boy with a name. Of course he had a name, but now I knew it. As he pressed on the bones of his spine, he asked “Shu ismak?” What’s your name? Blood dripped down onto his neck, soaking his T-shirt and making a burgundy collar.Īs I dropped him onto the stretcher in trauma bay two, the system took over: nurses got vitals, my colleague came into the room and started to talk to the boy while making sure his neck wasn’t injured. Through his pain and fear he must have seen my blue eyes, my Western face I couldn’t imagine what he thought. He moaned softly and turned his head toward me. I looked down at the boy I saw the lacerations on his lips and face and saw his front teeth, smashed and broken. Risking injury to the boy’s spinal cord, I pushed my arms under his shoulders and legs and scooped him up, the circle dissolved and I was alone with the boy.Īs I walked, all I heard were my steady, laboured breaths. It would take an hour to get to the hospital, although it was only 200 metres away. I looked through the legs of the people around me, saw the stationary cars, heard their horns and remembered the traffic. Someone asked, “Hakim, should we call an ambulance?” He was breathing, he was holding his knees and rocking ever so slightly all good signs. I knelt next to the boy, the holes in his clothes and the dirt on his skin declaring him a refugee. I shoved open the doors and pushed the bags into his hands and said, “Look after these, thanks!” The owner knows me and always slips in extra treats whenever I spoil the kids with something sweet. A–B–C–D–E was ringing loudly in my head - A, airway B, breathing - but I felt paralyzed holding those bags. But I stood with gift bags in hand, frozen. I heard mutterings in Arabic of “fall” and “scaffold,” and I looked up and wondered how far he had fallen and why he was up there in the first place. He was motionless face down, holding his knees, a halo of blood spreading steadily and silently away from his head. I looked down and saw a boy, maybe eight years old. I pushed through the snarling traffic and entered the circle. In the space she left, I saw a small person lying still on the sidewalk. A woman stepped away, her head shaking from side to side, her hands on her cheeks, an anguished look on her pale face. I saw a crowd gathering at the base of some untidy scaffolding pushed up against a building. I drowned out their noise with music blasting through earphones lodged firmly in my head.Ī harrowing cry pierced the music and my head snapped sideways. Bored, frustrated drivers “whatsapped,” “facebooked” or leaned on their horns. I walked beside a road full of cars that jostled and pushed the arteries of Beirut on a Tuesday evening are always clogged. I held bags filled with things she didn’t need but would probably love. I’d picked up the hints my daughter had dropped and was loaded down with her birthday presents as I walked to my exwife’s apartment to deliver them.
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