The Child Madonna - "AD 2000"

AD 2000

During the shelling of Sarajevo, a young woman and her husband got trapped in the crossfire as they were trying to leave the battered city. As others ran on ahead, the girl faltered because she was pregnant. The youth dragged his young wife to the partial shelter of a church doorway. There, in the noise of guns - prematurely because of the shock - she gave birth to her baby.

The young Hutu couple fled from Kigale to the Burundi border where they found a makeshift camp with thousands of starving children and their desperate parents. The journey had taken its toll on the pregnant wife in particular, and the young husband pleaded with the few overwhelmed aid workers for some food. In the end he got a precious bag and sprinted through the milling crowds back to the barren stretch of earth where his emaciated young wife was struggling to give birth to her first child.

The young couple wandered up the dingy corridor, peering into each cot. The tired nurse from the Romanian orphanage gestured helplessly at each tiny suffering body. How to choose? Then the couple saw him. The baby lay twisted and dirty on the soiled mattress. “He’s handicapped,” the nurse explained dismissively. “We want him” the couple said in unison.

The girl had followed her older brothers out of the favela on the outskirts of Rio when her father had got drunk and had beaten their mother up. She was ten. She lived in a concrete watercourse near the vegetable market with a group of other street children. By the time she was fourteen she sold herself to buy enough food for several of the younger children, then she became pregnant. She was found crying one night by a nun, who brought her into the hostel, where she gave birth to a baby girl.

The prostitute put her twelve year old daughter on the streets of the Philippine Olongopo City, near where the American service base had been, in order to survive. Her own looks were fading and the young servicemen had no longer wanted her. Then the military base closed and the Americans went home. The girl found that she was having a baby and had nothing. Another girl told her about a hostel in the city where kind people would look after her. She allowed herself to be taken there, frightened and ashamed. There she gave birth to her pale-skinned son.

The refugees fled from the Iraqi army high into the barren mountains between Turkey and the Iraqi border, and existed in a few tents erected in the windswept valley, 4000 feet above sea level. One bitter winter night a young wife gave birth, her husband wrapped the newborn baby in the sweater that the relief agency had given him.

The doctor from the aid agency picked his way through the dirt and stench of the muddy alleyway between the tarpaulins and corrugated iron shacks of Daravi, the largest slum in Asia. Half-naked toddlers were leaping from the crumbling concrete bases of the ugly pylons that carried electricity to the gaunt factories of Bombay - but not to the shanty town - eight year olds pestered him for rupees. He took one look at the groaning woman in the dim light, checked the lack of running water and knew he must get her to hospital. But it was too late, the baby was coming, somehow mother and child would survive.

The teenage girl ran away from the children’s home; an older girl had been bullying her, she was afraid to tell anyone. She went to London, new ‘so-called’ friends introduced her to drugs and a cardboard home under Charing Cross bridge. Someone seemed to take pity on her, found her a room, then took advantage. She became pregnant and was thrown out. A Salvation Army captain assisted at the birth and handed the tiny bundle to the exhausted girl - at last she smiled.

BC 7
The smelly cave was in the rocky hillside, 2000 feet up, lashed by a cold and bitter wind. The young girl had had a rough time in her village - few would have believed her story - she must have had guts to go through with it. She was very tired; three or four days on a lumbering donkey, the last few miles travelled with increasing panic as the birth pangs gripped her; the couple could find no lodgings. There she gave birth to her son and then, because of a threatened genocide, became, with her husband and young baby, a refugee in Egypt.