During his speech at the UN earlier this week, President Obama read aloud a letter he received from a six-year-old boy in New York offering to adopt Omran, the child who was injured when his home in Aleppo, Syria was bombed and destroyed.
The image of five-year-old Omran, covered in blood and sitting in stunned silence inside an ambulance immediately after the bombing, went viral across the world. Tragically, Omran’s big brother, 10-year-old Ali, died a few days later from his injuries.
In the letter — which President Obama also posted on Facebook and has since been shared over 150,000 times — Alex wrote that he wanted Omran to come live with him and they “can all play together. We will give him a family and he will be our brother.”
Alex added that his little sister would also help Omran learn how to ride a bike. “We will be waiting for you guys with flags, flowers, and balloons.”
From President Obama’s Facebook post:
Those are the words of a six-year-old boy — a young child who has not learned to be cynical or suspicious or fearful of other people because of where they come from, how they look, or how they pray.
We should all be more like Alex. Imagine what the world would look like if we were. Imagine the suffering we could ease and the lives we could save.