IN HIS OWN WORDS
Dr. Al-Sumait wrote this passage for his son, recalling a visit to one of the orphanages he ran in Africa. It is one of the few places where he writes about himself — and he uses it to say that he had not understood, either.
I remember that on an earlier visit to this city I went to the orphanage we run there, which held about forty of our orphans. Every one of them was suffering from malnutrition — the medical report recorded it on the day each of them was admitted — and we began to feed them properly.
Among them were two brothers. The elder was about nine or ten. We could not reach him in time: the malnutrition had already done its work on his brain, and the damage was permanent. We gave him private tutors, we watched over him closely — and still we were never able to get him through the first-grade examinations.
His younger brother, six years old, had arrived in the same condition. He recovered remarkably. He finished first in the whole school.
I could see intelligence flashing in his eyes. I pulled him to my chest, joy rising in me, and lifted him up and carried him through the village, talking to him as we walked. I asked him: what is your distant dream, the one you wish for when you are grown, the one that seems hard to reach? Do you want to be a doctor? To own a car? To become a pilot?
His answer came back like a slap that wakes a man out of his own dreams.
“When I grow up, I want to taste a biscuit.”
A SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY, FIRST IN HIS SCHOOL
My eyes filled with tears.
After all the years I have spent in Africa, I am still living in another world. So what of our brothers and sisters who live in the Arab countries and elsewhere, who have never visited Africa and never lived among its people?
I thought of our children in our houses. I thought of you, my son. I thought of the millions like you, eating every kind of sweet and every kind of food.
And I asked God to lighten the reckoning of the parents who let them live in such comfort, while their brothers in Africa find none of it except in dreams — no, they do not find it even in their dreams.
SOURCE
Riḥlat Khayr fī Ifrīqiyā (A Journey of Good in Africa), by Dr. Abdul Rahman Hammoud Al-Sumait. Maṭābiʿ Mirʾāt al-Umma.
«رحلة خير في أفريقيا» — د. عبد الرحمن حمود السميط، مطابع مرآة الأمة.
Translated from the Arabic for this site. The passage is given in full, without abridgement.
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