Hamid is a man of faith and is faithful to Allah. If I must believe in something or someone, I prefer to do so in Hamid
Just a year ago I said goodbye to the Moroccan desert, assuming that I would return when the summer heat passed.
One of the things I miss most about my life at Erg Chebbi are the talks with Hamid in his workshop. Hamid transmits peace when you look into his eyes. From a very young age he began tinkering with engines of all kinds until he became the best mechanic in the province of Errachidia. There have been many times that he has lent me his workshop to carry out maintenance on the Red Zebra and Tormenta. He knows that he has carte blanche to mess with my car, but not my motorcycle, even though he is a meticulous and careful mechanic.
Mototherapy
This morning, when I was in my mototherapy session with Dr. Tormenta, I remembered a text I wrote, about five years ago, about one of those talks with Hamid. It is a story with a very positive message and full of hope. It is a real story, about real people, that brings me spiritually closer to the essence of the desert and what it means to me.
A talk among friends
It was a hot day in June and I had arranged to meet Hamid in Erfoud to help me resolve a matter. Before returning home, in Takojt, we chatted for a while sheltered under the shadow of a building. I told her that I had seen her daughter doing very well and asked her if she had already recovered one hundred percent. She looked at me with a dead smile. She took a while to answer.
Hamid has a little girl and a little boy. His daughter, a few months after birth, had a tumor appear in her neck. He took her to the Errachidia hospital, where she was told that the girl was too young for surgery, so she would have to wait. The days went by and the tumor became bigger and bigger. Hamid, very worried, did not want to wait any longer and decided to find a solution as soon as possible. For months he visited all the clinics and hospitals in the big cities of Morocco. The search became a nightmare of thousands of kilometers by car, full of desperation. Doctors and surgeons did not dare to operate, probably due to lack of means and experience.
In Rabat, the big capital, they added him to a long list that exceeded a year of waiting. In a private clinic they asked him for 2,000 Euros for the operation. That was a fortune that the head of the family could not assume. Some relatives who had the money did not even offer to help him. When Hamid explained to me the odyssey he went through for a year, he saw in his eyes the martyrdom that he assumed. The situation was so demoralizing that he had no choice but to entrust himself to Allah. Whether his daughter lived or died she was no longer in his hands.
When Hamid was already completely collapsed, returning home from Fez where he had left the hospital with his daughter, again empty-handed, worthy of a fighter who never gives up, he decided to visit the Errachidia hospital again. And how things are that after a year, when in that same hospital he had been told that nothing could be done, Hamid found, in the right place and at the right time, the right person. After two days, his daughter was operated on in that same hospital.
Strength and hope
My friend’s eyes were shining when he told me that the operation had lasted four hours. They were four very long hours, very nervous, not knowing if he and his wife would see his daughter alive again. Their hearts stopped when the doctor appeared, but the operation had gone well and that fueled his hope. The day after the intervention, as if it were a miracle, the girl was happy and playing. “It was like they had exchanged my girl for another,” Hamid confessed to me. The result seemed incredible to him.
I’m sure that when Hamid looks at his daughter, he thinks about everything that has happened. When he was about to throw in the towel he found the solution. The life of her daughter was in her hands and not being able to do anything for her had plunged her into anguish. Hamid didn’t give up and after that experience I know he never will. This is something that makes me think that he is someone I can trust, that he knows the value of effort and perseverance, and that in life there is no choice but to fight until the end.
Hamid is a man of faith and is faithful to Allah. If I must believe in something or someone, I prefer to do so in Hamid.
