One night the telephone rings. My friend Antonio, the only pediatrician of the hospital answers the call. I can see from his expression that something bad has happened. We run to the pediatric department. A very ill child has just arrived. In the small hospital of Nanoro there are not enough equipments to treat him properly. Antonio decides to take him to Ouagadougou, with an ambulance (a ramshackle van with a big red cross painted on a side). The trip is long, two hours in the middle of the savannah, with only the light of the moon to light up the red color of the soil of the road. Antonio works incessantly to reanimate the child in front of the eyes of the parents. When they arrive at the entrance of the hospital the child dies. Antonio enters the hospital with the little body on his arms, place him on the first bed he can see and tries a last attempt to reanimate him. But it is useless. On the same bed, he realizes, there are already two little small dead bodies. While leaving the hospital he notices another child having problems in one of the beds, he calls the doctor of the department and warns about the suffering child. Both agree on the medicine to use in the situation but the doctor hesitate to start the treatment. Antonio encourages the doctor to inject the medicine before it is too late but the other replies that for that night the supply of syringe is finished. Antonio runs to the ambulance, in his backpack he finds a few syringes that he brought from Nanoro.
Going home, in the silent night of the savannah the father of the child thanks Antonio. They were lucky that the he didn’t die in the hospital In Ouagadougou. In that case they would have had paid for the transportation of the body back to Nanoro.
The sun is raising, from the villages we can already hear the sound of the new Floby song.
Filippo Zambon 