No heaven for some little girls

THE EDITOR: The picture of the five-year-old sitting in the semi-darkness against a wall near the Siparia Police Station in the front page one of the dailies of May 23 brought tears to my eyes. Words elude me to describe the myriad emotions etched on her face.

The Mona Lisa as a portrait exudes peace and contentment in a world so bright and beautiful, but the picture of this little girl seemed its antithesis, barefooted and alone with her jhagi bundle, her parents wherever, a forlorn look on her face, mystified probably by her plight, in a strange land sitting against a wall in the dead of night when she at her age should be in a soft bed with soft white pillows, her mom reading or crooning her to sleep with the prospect of dreams about angels or Cinderella or Snow White.

How could this be? But it is, with a little girl just like her on the Mexican border with nowhere to sleep, the possible victim of an adult who would abuse her.

Or one somewhere on the French side of the English Channel running with her parents from Syria, cold and wet, having to lie on a wet muddy floor on wet blankets, if any.

Or yet another somewhere in Yemen, all skin and bones waiting for a meal that will probably never come, too weak to be shocked by the Saudi bombs falling around her.

“Thank heaven for little girls” Maurice Chevalier would sing in Gigi but has heaven done all three a great disservice to subject them to this?

But it’s not heaven’s fault nor theirs, nor their parents’. It falls squarely on the lap of politicians like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and the cronies who support him, whose love for power and greed for money have made them less than human, with no awareness of the plight of the little girl in the dark in Siparia who has become the collateral damage of their lust for power and money.

Or like Bashar al-Assad in Syria whose quest to remain entrenched would make little girls like this one expendable, having to face the horrors of refugee life, never to enjoy the little pleasures all little girls love.

Or like the Saudi king, who would never see the poor, little, starving five-year-old in Yemen of the same flesh and blood and beating heart like that of his own daughter.

Where are we headed as one of nature’s creatures, and I digress to include ourselves, being as entrenched in blood as we are, with seemingly no thought of tomorrow? Are we evolving downwards, in the converse Darwinian sense, into the state of the beast?

I have no answer, and the little one in her state of innocence in the dark in Siparia can only be bewildered by it all as her expression clearly indicates.

Do you have an answer?

DR ERROL N BENJAMIN via e-mail