Cohen, thank you very much

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This is the most difficult incident I have ever experienced. It was a hot summer afternoon in 1986, the place was a public park in an English suburb, my father was visiting us, where I was living with my family, I was with him and my three children.

We played together for a little while and my father decided to walk in the garden with two of his grandchildren. He left me with my younger son who was barely five years old. While playing on the swing he fell from the highest point and became unconscious.

I did not know the way to the nearest hospital, and even if I knew I could not do anything, the keys to the car were with me, but I did not know the way to the nearest hospital, and I did not know what to do to help my child.

I stood in the middle of the street carrying my son’s almost ‘lifeless’ body in my arms. He was injured right and left. My view was pathetic. Within minutes a driver stopped and asked me to get in and took me to the nearest hospital.

I felt it was the longest route I had ever known in my life. At the same time the thought of what I will tell his mother was playing in my mind if anything bad happened to my son. What will happen to me and who am I responsible for? What would it be like if Muhammad had a concussion and became incapacitated, would our problems double at a time when his bigger brother is unable to rely on himself?

After we arrived at the hospital I handed the child over to the doctors. I waited for the result for more than an hour. They told me that he will live and that he was fine! I waited another one hour to get assurance that no severe damage has been done to him or there were no signs of concussions or broken limbs and that he will live a normal life within days.

Suddenly, I became aware of what was going on around me, and I discovered that a British man who had given me the most precious help in my life and took me to the hospital and saved the life of my beloved child was still sitting by my side.

I thanked him profusely and apologized for the inconvenience I had caused him, and thanked him more warmly for his role in saving the life of my young son, and asked him for his name or contact number and promised to meet him at some later time so I can reward him for his help.

He refused to accept anything from me and said he would wait for me and my son to take us back to the garden. He was aware that even if I paid for a cab to take me back to the place, I would not know how to direct the driver.

He refused to give me his name or telephone number. He said he had done nothing special and that what he had done was part of his duty, nothing more nothing less.

About six months later, on a social occasion, a man shook my hands and asked me if I still know him. I shook my head. He said, ‘Cohen’, the man who had taken me and my son to the hospital. He understood that I had not recognized him at the top of my confusion.

I knew from him that he was a committed British Jew, that he knew from my dialect and perhaps from my face that I was a ‘Middle Easterner’ and that he refused to give me his name and telephone number because he did not want to spoil the pleasure of doing volunteer work. For Cohen and tens of thousands of good people like him, I will always be in the service of humanity without discrimination because of color, religion, race or sect.

We ask His Highness the Prime Minister to support the Minister of Housing Jinan Ramadan, in the face of her fierce opponents, but to keep her in her position until corruption is uprooted and not give in to dubious claims from people who are striving for her dismissal.

e-mail: [email protected]

By Ahmad Al Sarraf

This news has been read 10596 times!