JEDDAH, 30 May 2006 — Hospital staffers representing Suleiman, a multilingual eight-year-old Saudi boy born with gastrointestinal defects, are seeking a charity organization or philanthropist to take up his guardianship as his parents left him at the Mahayel Asir General Hospital in the southern province of Asir, Al-Riyadh newspaper reported yesterday.
Suleiman was born to a woman from a remote village in early 1998. The child was missing organs for passing his waste. Doctors operated on the baby to fit him with two tubes to make up for his congenital defects. The excuse of Suleiman’s father for leaving the fate of his handicapped child to hospital staffers was that he was afraid that the child would not get the required medical attention if he were taken home in the remote village of Molaiha.
Since then the children’s ward in the hospital is his home and the nurses and doctors are his guardians. The director of the hospital, Ali ibn Yahya Al-Kasi, shows special interest in the child.
“All the employees in the hospital look after Suleiman. They feed him, clothe him and buy him toys and any thing he wants. Filipino, Arab, English and Indian nurses have brought him up and therefore he speaks all their languages fluently. Still he does not read and write as he was never sent to school,” Majdi Ibrahim, one of his benefactors at the hospital, said.
“Since the parents did not want to take him home, the boy has been growing up in the hospital. But now he has to be sent to school. We have been contacting several charitable institutions to adopt him so that he may get a decent education enabling him to integrate into the society,” said Mashhoor Shamakhi, head of the social service department at the hospital.
This isn’t the only case of handicapped children being abandoned by their parents, leaving hospital staffers as their only family.
In April, Arab News wrote about the case of two-year-old Abdullah, who was born with spina bifida and was ditched by his parents.
Abdullah’s parents abandoned him at King Abdul Aziz Hospital in Jeddah. He has since grown attached to hospital workers.
Authorities appear to be sitting idly by as parents are allowed to dump their unwanted handicapped children on hospitals. Saudi social workers and authorities do nothing to make the parents accept their responsibility rather than choosing which of their children they will accept and raise as their own.
