An extremely difficult read but please, please take a few minutes to read what doctor Housam Adnan from #EasternGhouta wrote yesterday:
From the womb of the dead
For more than twenty years, the scalpel was my companion
Dancing between my fingers, while I do my work very quietly
At the end of each day I whisper to it:
You did very well, and we saved many together
But everything changed now
The scalpel wasn't what it used to be, lately
My fingers can't handle it anymore
As if a part of my soul was taken into its teeth, and it can't bear the wounds it witnesses anymore
Children without parts
Without eyes
Without faces
Women and families covered by sheets full of soil from the home land, with more of her children's blood
The smell of gunpowder and its abhorred black color hangs over those hungry, withered faces
The screams of children, the wailing of women, the oppression of men, the impotence of doctors, reached my dead scalpel, creating a spirit of the misery inside it, that it stopped working after what it witnessed, but those cries did not reach the hearts of the world to awake it
Today, all those who came to us are slim skinny bodies that haven't tasted food for days. Buried with their children under the rubble of those barrels that do not distinguish between stones and human
Today from under the rubble of our homeland they brought to me a mother in her seventh month of pregnancy, with two of her children
If I told you that the misery of the world came together in the eyes of those children, I wouldn't be describing enough
The first child without a right leg and has a broken arm. The other has lost his eye and shrapnel entered his chest, and the mother is struggling to survive. The shrapnel has broken all of her slim body sending to our hands to witness her last breath.
I see her struggling for survival, her eyes are fixed on her little ones being in that situation
The father left them, dead, a few months ago
They brought them to me in one cover, because we lost our Patient stretchers, we used them as beds, because beds are full
I beg you to imagine with me, just for a moment that scene and that torn, torn blanket that carried the four lives: the mother, her fetus and her two children.
A colleague whispered in my ear
Maybe we can save her baby
For the first time, I sat down thinking with my head down
"do we save him, or leave him happy with his mother without seeing the ugliness of this world,
Do I let him go with her
No.. no
My mission is to save him
I looked around
Her torn children
Her soul that's leaving her body
The noise of planes and exploding barrels
Children's crying that burns the heart
And my colleague whispering:
What are you waiting for
Come on
There's a life we should get out
I looked at my scalpel and friend
To what life will you get him out?
The world of barrels, fire and disappointment?
The world of orphanhood, oppression and hunger?
Who will breastfeed him?
Who will change his pampers?
Who will rock him?
Who will hear his weeping?
Yes, he has a god that won't give up on him, but I became unable, along with my scalpel, to even think
My colleague's voice awoke me from my fantasies
"her heart stopped"
I'll take him out now, with her dead
And for the first time in my life, I couldn't do it, my scalpel stopped me. I put it on the table, and left in silence.
My colleague continued his work, his eyes full of tears, while looking at me in surprise
All that incident took only a few minutes, but it marked a years-long wound, a wound made of defeat and impotence. I didn't imagine I'd read in the stories of Tatars' massacres, inquisition stories, or even the pharaoh's tales.
World, leaders and kings of the world:
Your silence over these massacres affecting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, who did nothing except being on a land called "Al Ghouta of Damascus" is a shame
I'm not going to ask you to save #Ghouta, but to save your humanity
Save your people
Your children
And be sure, this baby coming out of his martyr mother is your responsibility
Feed him
Keep him warm
Give him his right in living a decent life
Stop these sky monsters with the barrels of death
Come and join the children of Ghouta
Touch their faces, listen to their hungry stomach's noises
Aren't they humans?
Announce that you care about all humans, not only your blood like, this would save what's left of god's spirit in you
#SaveGhouta
Please keep the suffering and the unsung heroes like medics and the White Helmets in your prayers.
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