Abdullah Abdel Karim
(An Emirati writer)
He left life to stay. His tragedy created a new awareness for us and summoned our humanity. He brought us out of the coma of forgetting our humanity.
Despite the momentum of daily events, people even forget each other.
It was an ordinary incident represented by the fall of the Moroccan child Rayan into a well that could have passed like other accidents, but dealing with it with attempts to save him over the course of five days have reignited the desire to be cleansed of the indifference that have dominated so much of our practice towards the human soul.
The interaction of the civil defense teams in the Kingdom of Morocco day and night to save Rayan prompted us all to apologise for our past of killing ourselves and our children with neglect. In the past, our hearts were not shaken and our eyes did not shed tears.
We all raced, regardless of status, to follow up on the rescue of Ryan and many cheered on social media about the success of Ryan’s rescue from the well.
Rayan, 5, fell on Tuesday, February 1, into a narrow, uncovered well near the family home in the Chefchaouen region in northern Morocco.
He died on the evening of Saturday, February 5, despite the tireless efforts made by the various Moroccan authorities and the success of the rescue teams in getting him out of the well.
Hashtags like “#Save_Rayan”; “Great_Joy_In_Saving_Ryan” and “Rayan_Is_Dead” have become our daily language and our psychological and mental concerns.
Rayan’s incident demonstrated reality, not studies or perceptions, that the media, with its various means, is the most rapid and effective weapon in creating trends, feelings, concepts, agreement and disagreement.
I hope that humanity will mark Rayan’s story as the beginning of saving all the children of the world.
Many accidents changed history as US physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the maker of the nuclear bomb, said, “Now I become death.”
We also say that Ryan’s accident is a bomb that restored life to humanity, a life of pity and compassion; a life of solidarity and synergy; a life of tenderness and mercy.
Finally, we pray to God that he goes to heaven, and to give his parents and family patience and solace.
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