One of my friends told me once that her relative’s baby was lost in the Grand Mosque 20 years ago. The woman still goes every week to the mosque looking for her missing child. The baby was four years old when she lost him. He would be a young man if he were still alive. Even though the mother has a number of other children, she can’t stop looking for her son who went missing long ago. She says that her heart tells her that he’s alive and that she’ll find him one day.
I don’t know why this woman’s dilemma touched my heart and affected me so deeply. I imagined her enthusiasm and weekly anticipation in finding her missing child who could be anywhere now or even dead. After all this time the woman is still hoping and dreaming she might find her son one day.
Another woman in Jizan lost her young son to the sea. He went with some of his friends to a nearby island and when they came back, he was missing. His mother has been waiting for over 20 years for his return. She believes he’s still alive and that he’s going to walk into the house one day and greet her.
In a bizarre coincidence, my phone rang while I was writing this article. Maybe it’s a situation of telepathy where my friend and I communicated through thought transference. She called me to tell me that she had attended a funeral the previous night. A family of three people had died in a car crash. She told me that there was an Umm Mohammad who was weeping over the dead and recalling her own experience. She had lost a brother and a son in car accidents.
An unidentified man came into the Riyadh Military Hospital and abducted a newborn baby girl a couple of weeks ago. Another baby girl was kidnapped from Jouf. These two incidents brought all these stories back to my mind. Our society has never witnessed similar crimes before and had never even heard of them. Perhaps we might have heard of a child abducted from the mosque, a shopping center or school but to be kidnapped from a huge government hospital, I think, is something alarming and dangerous.
How does a mother who left her baby in a crib to go to the bathroom and came back to see the child missing feel? What could bring these children back to their parents? Do you think a reward would help? What about the hospital security systems? Don’t we have enough mistakes and deaths as a result of medical malpractice inside hospitals?
The problem is that these babies were taken from big well-known hospitals where security is very crucial. How can anyone compensate these parents for the pain of losing their children? What would make them feel better or forget their misfortune? What could bring back these children who were taken from what are supposedly the safest and most protected of places?
