Khaberni - In a small corner of this nation, stands a child named Amir Nabeel Al-Bustanji; he carries no sword nor banner, but a stomach that fears a loaf, and a body that resists crumbs of bread as a soldier resists bullets.
A child who asks for nothing more than to eat like other children; without the bite turning into danger, and without milk becoming an enemy and pasta a trap.
Amir suffers from a disease called celiac disease — or as medicine calls it "wheat allergy," and his father calls it "the pain that cannot be healed" — a harsh autoimmune disease that makes the body revolt against itself; it destroys his intestines, and threatens his liver and growth if he ever neglects his diet.
There is no cure for it except strict adherence to a gluten-free diet; his food is more expensive than gold and rarer than justice.
Imagine that a loaf of bread that sells for one dinar for us, sells for four for Amir; and the tomato sauce that we add to pasta sells for six for him; and the chocolate that delights the hearts of all children only delights his heart if his father pays a dinar and a half.
Even the pasta that boils in minutes costs his family two dinars and eighty cents per kilogram; as if every grain of it is extracted from a mine in Dabouq or Abdoun.
Amir does not know the taste of “food freedom”; he lives in a house where loaves are hidden as secrets are concealed; and sweets are hidden in cabinets as tears are hidden.
And when his childhood overcomes him, he stealthily steals a piece of ma’amoul, hides under the bed, eats it secretly as if it were a crime, then his body punishes him before anyone does.
One evening, Amir hid a small loaf inside his stomach, under his clothes, as one who smuggles a dream from the mouth of hunger.
He walked with trembling steps to his room, thinking that no one would see him.
But his older uncle's eyes spotted him, so he approached quietly, and when he lifted the child's shirt he saw the loaf resting on a belly as thin as the moon, and the man wept softly… he cried because a single loaf was now hidden as secrets and faults are hidden, and because hunger in this nation is no longer a hunger for bread, but a hunger for justice and mercy.
His father, a simple employee who earns a salary that barely covers the middle of the month; yet every day he stands in front of Abdoun's shelves, counting the prices with one hand and watching his son with the other, fearing to see him hungry, or to see him collapse in front of a forbidden piece of chocolate.
Eighty dinars for supplements and vitamins, and ninety for the bread alone, besides the spices and special sauces…
Numbers that exceed capability, but not the father's love, dignity, and patience.
Amir does not want pity, he wants to live simply like us; to eat his bread without pain, to laugh without counting the bites of joy against him, to be “normal” in a world that has left no safe space for childhood.
And here, we direct our call not to the people, but to the state.
To the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Development, the Aid Fund, and every institution that swears by the nation not to leave its children alone against the disease.
Amir is not an isolated case; he is a reflection of dozens of children who fight wheat with tiny teeth and big hearts.
He deserves to have his diet provided for free, and his condition included in the health and food support files, and to be treated as any child who needs his medicine to live.
O government of this nation,
Save “Amir” from a hunger unlike any other, and from a disease not healed by medicine but by responsibility.
Open for him the door of justice as you open the doors of taxes, and wipe from his forehead the harshness of prices as you wipe the promises off the screens.
For every loaf presented to him is not a favor, but a duty of a state towards a child standing on the edge of life… and smiling.
