MISSOURI WATCH: HE IS AN AFRICAN BOY, AND HIS NAME IS EMMANUEL

Every day I pass by a picture on my office wall that never fails to give me pause, a moment of reflection; a twinge of pain, a trace of sadness that will not leave despite the passage of several months.

It is a picture of a small, extremely frail 11-year-old African boy leaning for consolation and safety for the support and reassurance of my daughter. Together they are watching and witnessing the closure of one of the world's worst genocides that claimed the lives of some 1,000,000 innocent human beings in the African nation of Rwanda.

My daughter had covered the genocide when it was occurring last year and now had returned to witness its closure: the burial ceremony of thousands of families in their final resting place. By native tradition, the dead had been left where they had fallen, their bodies not to be disturbed until Nature had taken its course and the flesh and organs had turned to bone and dust. From this state they were at last moved to communal graves, each family set apart from the others by a few feet of African soil.

When my daughter had returned for this ceremony, she was greeted at the moment of her plane's arrival by the young boy in the picture. His name was Emmanuel, and he was the sole survivor of the worst tragedy that can befall a young child: the death of his parents, his brothers and sisters, his grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins before his very eyes. His survival had been nothing less than miraculous, the odds of his being alive at the moment he saw my daughter almost a million to one.

The youth had been kept alive primarily by the good resources of several church charities, but alive for what? With his family gone, he faced the day-to-day existence that was shared with the other survivors, none of whom had escaped the unspeakable horror of mass murder, ethnic cleaning, civil war of never-ending horror. Staying alive was a daily miracle.

Emmanuel had lived for the moment that had also brought my daughter to this now-forsaken territory: the mass burial ceremony that would mark the end to the days and weeks and months of mass murders. He seemed not to have hesitated to choose my daughter as the person he wanted to share this last moment he would spend with his departed family.

Emmanuel stayed at the side of my daughter until she left Rwanda. They shared the awfulness, the grieving, the quietness of the moments, the return of thousands of human carcasses to the earth from which they had come. It was a moment of silence, ritual, solemnity, suffering and sorrow.

In the picture that I see every day, Emmanuel's eyes are lowered to the ground, his frail body leaning for the strength afforded by his friend, but it is the eyes that never fail to touch the strings of my heart and bring a lump to my throat. Emmanuel's eyes could never be captured by an artist, no matter how great, for they reveal, as nothing else could, the horror of one 11-year-old boy who experienced anguish far beyond what the rest of us could even imagine.

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't offer a silent prayer for Emmanuel. I try to compute the odds of his being alive today and cease when the pain gets too personal and overwhelming. The terrible truth is that Emmanuel has nothing to live for, and his existence, if assured by some miracle, holds no promise of even one second of well-being.

It is too painful to speculate on how many Emmanuels there are in the world today, how many exist right here in America and how many are still alive, if barely, in the countrysides of Bosnia, Somalia, China, Peru and every other spot on the globe in which mankind's children are in danger of extinction.

I know this is a season in which we proclaim brotherhood and love and charity, and I thank God these treasures exist in many parts of the world, including our own. But I know that the God who gave us this wonderful season is also aware of the Emmanuels who exist in far too many places to be ignored or forgotten.

I have to trust that God will somehow bless the unblessed, comfort the uncomfortable, save those who have been doomed to an existence too horrible for us to imagine. I have to believe that or else the joys of this season have no meaning and the spirit of fellowship that exists is only a rare entry in the diary of the world.

Merry Christmas, Emmanuel. The only gift I can offer is a prayer to Almighty God that He will give you strength to endure. I know it isn't much, but it's everything that I have.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.