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From devastation to stories of hope
The boy's name, Abid Tanoli, meant nothing to me. I had never
visited Pakistan, where he lived; I probably couldn't even
point on a map to Karachi, the city where the 17-year-old
lived.
But when I read his story in a Sunday newspaper, I found
there were tears running down my face, and when my wife asked
what was wrong, I couldn't tell her.
Hanna thought someone had died. And somebody did, though
thank God it was not Abid Tanoli.
The news story was horrific enough: the teenager had been
sexually propositioned by his religious teacher at his Islamic
school. The boy had bravely rebuffed the schoolmaster, who
broke into Abid's home with three accomplices and hurled acid
over his head and body.
The teacher's parting words were: "That should be a
lesson for life."
Abid was horribly scarred - so hideously burned that his
father fainted when he found him. His eyes were melted in
their sockets, and he was utterly blinded.
"It would have been better if they had just killed my
son," said his mother, Resham Jan, aged 40. "We
are dying every day. My son was such a good-looking person.
I cannot believe he has been reduced to such a pitiful state."
I showed the story to Hanna, who agreed it was ghastly, but
she guessed something more lay behind my reaction, something
that must have happened before I ever knew her.
It was a memory I had buried for more than 30 years. On a
hillside near Ramallah in the West Bank, during the Six-Day
War in 1967, my unit engaged in heavy fighting with Jordanian
forces. The Israeli airforce bombarded the hillside with napalm,
a horrific weapon that causes unimaginable suffering as it
kills.
Napalm is a petroleum gel that sticks to the skin and burns
at white-hot temperatures, around 5,000C - hot enough to melt
glass.
In the confusion and panic of the battle, some of the Israeli
napalm was dumped on our own troops. The euphemism used by
journalists today is "friendly fire", this fire
was the cruellest enemy I ever saw. A man stumbled past me
with no face - the gel had scorched every scrap of flesh away
and was dripping through his skull into his brain.
I have no idea who he was, whether he was a comrade I had
trained with, eaten with, joked and jumped from aeroplanes
with. By the time I saw him collapse, he no longer had an
identity.
In those six days, there was worse to come for me. My best
friend died in my arms, and I shot dead an enemy soldier as
he stared into my eyes. When I regained consciousness in a
field hospital with lumps of metal buried in my arm, there
was far more in my head than I could deal with. A lot of the
memories were repressed.
That Sunday morning, Abid's story brought one of them to
the light.
I wanted desperately to help the boy. The paper had discovered
that a surgeon in Athens might be able to restore a fraction
of Abid's sight, and I immediately decided to pay for his
family's flights to Greece and their hotel in the city.
Many other readers shared my concern, and within days £12,000
had been pledged for Abid's fund.
Then came the most incredible news of all, surgeon Dr Anatasios
John Kanellopoulos was willing to operate for free.
The procedure was a success beyond Abid's hopes. Despite
the risks involved in this impossibly delicate operation,
Dr Kanellopoulos was able to restore vision in both eyes,
a feat other doctors had written off as impossible.
The surgeon wrote me a long and detailed letter as Abid recovered.
Much of his news was hard to understand: Dr Kanellopoulos
is an associate professor of opthalmology at the NYU Medical
School in New York, and I am not, so talk of kerato-prosthesis
and non-phthisical eyes and tarsorrhapy didn't do much to
enlighten me.
But one sentence stood out: "With a special video device
we have been able to have Abid reading, and this has been
very rewarding. Abid's expectations are high, and I do not
blame him, but we have to be very cautious with his progress,
in order to do more good than harm."
In December, on a trip to the Greek capital, I visited the
LaserVision Institute and met Dr Kanellopoulos. He turned
out to be impossibly charismatic, 6ft 4in with a close resemblance
to George Clooney.
With his looks and brilliant mind, he could do anything he
desired, but he judges that nothing could be more satisfying
than to mend shattered lives and enable a blinded teenager
to see.
We called Abid's doctors in Pakistan, the husband-and-wife
team of Aleisha Sheema and Nadeem Rizvi, who said Abid was
making excellent progress, with improving vision in his right
eye. He's able to get around on his own and reads well with
the aid of the Greek institute's camera device.
These dedicated people have my deepest respect and my gratitude.
Dr Kanellopolous and his colleagues will never know, but they
helped to end a nightmare of my own.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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