Recently local newspapers carried the heart-rending news of an orphan girl’s death resulting from bureaucratic inertia. Her case was mired in the labyrinth of procedures of a government-run orphanage, a leading hospital, police department and the social welfare department which is a subsidiary of the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, in the Makkah region.
Readers might also have noticed that our society did not care about the inhuman treatment meted out to its underprivileged members. It was content to revel in months-long festivals and shopping sprees, or disappear on exotic vacations.
Our claims of mutual support and social solidarity, mercy, and affection for the poor and needy would not have come to this sorry pass if we had not subjected our lives and actions to the giant groaning machine which is the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Its inefficient practices are a constant source of dissatisfaction.
The embarrassing question they have to address is: how does an orphan girl of 13 die from neglect while she is under the care of an orphanage run by the government?
The inexorable cycle of destiny and death are surely governed by Allah. But can the orphanage authorities say they did their best to save the girl?
What she lacked was not the special attention of the doctors at the hospital but the sympathetic treatment from a handful of orphanage officials who have all the power in their hands.
Let them gambol in their pleasures, but it should not be with the lives of the poor orphans and other underprivileged in society.
12 August 2002
