Tonight a few pictures of my visit in Serbia were shown on a news show.
I had to go through them to choose the ones to give them.
Of all the ones that I took during that trip, this last picture is the one that stuck with me. The one that I think about. Not that I like the picture for a particular reason. It’s the boy.
He was from Algeria. An Ali Baba, as they call north africans on the balkan route, meaning outlaws, often involved in smuggling and drug dealing, theft and petty crime in refugee camps. Of course I can be wrong, I’m not judging him, this is what he looked like to me. He was annoying, insisting to get my attention in a very unpolite way. He was angry. And he was definitely high on something. He was getting on my nerves because I was concentrated, working. But then I realized I was selecting those to photograph, choosing only afghan boys, and that was wrong, so I decided to spend some time with him. He wanted help. Badly. He showed me a bad cut in his guts. He had been stabbed.
An invisible among the invisibles. I was turning my eyes away from him and I felt sorry for that. A bad guy. Possibly a dangerous guy. But as we talked I started to see him. And today he’s the one that I remember. When someone is unlucky, down and out, in Italy we could call him “ A poor devil”. Poor devil I thought. And then these lines from Mark Twain came to mind: “ But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?“