Guardian readers fund life-changing surgery for Somali boy injured in US airstrike as reflected on by Giani Harpreet Singh
Here at Gurdwara Sahib Dasvandh, diesel engines rumble. Air brakes hiss constantly. Long-haul drivers pull their rigs off the highway day and night. They step down weary and road-worn. Then they sit on the Langar hall floor for warm dal and roti. We observe the modern world’s machinery operating at distance and scale in this transport crossroads. Goods move thousands of miles without a face attached. Similarly, distant wars are directed through cold monitors and automated steel. News reached us of young Abdiqadir Salah in Somalia. He suffered injuries alongside his kin from a remote airstrike. The grief hit home with immediate clarity. In Sikhi, we recognize the entire human race as one single family, Manas ki jaat sabhe eke paihchanbo. When metal falls upon a village thousands of miles away, it shatters the peace of our shared household. This tragedy highlights the need for compassion and action, like the funding for Abdiqadir’s life-changing surgery.
From Cold Monitors to Collective Conscience
The strike took twelve innocent lives in Jamaame. It reflects a grave spiritual illness. This illness arises when power separates itself from conscience. Our scriptures recognize tyranny and callous detachment as expressions of unchecked Haumai. Haumai is the egotism that reduces living beings into collateral tallies. Someone presses a button across an ocean. Coordinates are cleared. A family home turns into dust. Geopolitical silence buried seven-year-old Abdiqadir’s suffering for months. His pain was an inconvenient detail in an endless military tally. Yet, a child’s pain cannot hide from the Divine eye. Nor can the world’s moral ledger erase a mother’s cry carrying her wounded boy.
What followed the exposure of this cruelty reveals quiet power. This power can counter immense devastation. Everyday people read about this tragedy in the news. They pooled their resources. They funded the reconstructive surgery Abdiqadir desperately needed. In our tradition, we practice Dasvandh. This sacred discipline involves setting aside one-tenth of one’s honest earnings. We use it to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and bind the wounds of the afflicted. Dasvandh is not mere charity. It is not an act of condescension either. It acknowledges that what passes through our hands is not entirely our own. Instead, it is a trust given by the Creator to sustain creation. Strangers across continents gave what they had. A Somali child can now walk without torment. They truly enacted that very truth. This collective effort provided vital life-changing surgery.
Chardi Kala and the Call for Justice
Marian Haji Abdi Guled took her boy to the hospital in a rickshaw. She felt both joy and apprehension. This brings to mind the Sikh ideal of Chardi Kala. Chardi Kala is the spirit of eternal optimism, dignity, and resilience even in the darkest trial. True Chardi Kala does not mean pretending pain does not exist. It also does not mean injustice was not done. It means refusing to let despair claim the final word. This family persevered despite their village’s devastation. They lost eight children in that strike. Still, they carried life forward through endurance and prayer. Their steadfastness stands as a profound rebuke to the weapons that tried to extinguish them.
However, we must not let private compassion become an excuse for institutional impunity. Charity can mend bone and flesh. But it cannot restore the twelve lives stolen in the dark. Nor does it excuse governments that drop ordnance on sleeping communities without accountability. True Seva, selfless service, is never detached from justice. Guru Nanak openly challenged the emperors and warlords of his day. Their armies trampled the weak like wolves. Therefore, to care for the victim demands that we also speak truth. We must speak against the machinery of slaughter that created the victim in the first place.
The truck drivers will leave our Gurdwara tonight. They will haul cargo across the continent. They carry the weight of an interconnected world. That same interconnection binds our souls to Abdiqadir and his mother in Mogadishu. We cannot heal every scar carved by war. Yet, we can ensure that callous violence never has the undisputed field. The light of humanity asserts its sovereign presence against the darkness. It does so in every kitchen that feeds the stranger. It does so in every hard-earned coin given to heal a broken child and fund life-changing surgery.
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