Sometimes you see something that you know will stay with you for a long time: the iconic image of the US Navy sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square at the end of World War II; the white flower arrangement on top of Princess Diana’s casket topped by a single stark envelope with “Mummy” written on it in childish, uneven lettering; the haunting photo of a Sudanese child looking starved and exhausted with a vulture seemingly waiting for the opportunity to pounce on her tired body.
And this week, an image of a man in a red, dusty T-shirt splayed on his side on a pavement as a woman crouches next to him with a bottle of water.
At first glance, you would be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the man was suddenly taken ill. After you hear his tale though, you will wish that that was what happened instead of the horrific words that tumbled out of his parched lips between pleas not to be left to die in the road like an unwanted animal. Welcome to the latest chapter in our country’s construction industry saga.
Australia was built on the backs of criminals, modern America flourished under the hands of legal migrants who dreamt of streets paved with gold, and in sunny Malta, where we have made a habit of always being unfashionably late to the party, we have illegal migrants – anonymous shadows who build our homes and fear the police and their bosses in equal measure.
Only, the man allegedly left in the middle of a road by his boss, possibly to die after falling two storeys, is not a shadow. He has a name. He also has a family in Ghana that he sends money to whenever he can. It is for his wife, his two sons, and his widowed mother that he got on a roof on the morning of September 28. It is of them he was probably thinking when he hit the dust and was thrown in the back of a van to be supposedly taken to hospital.
This is what happens when a sector is allowed to flourish like cancer, unchecked and unchallenged- Anna Marie Galea
How many Jaiteh Lamins do we have in our country at this very moment? How many nameless men and women do we pass in the street and ignore? Like so many of our kin before us who fled to Australia because poverty ripped through our country and ravaged our society, these men and women leave their homes, their families, their identities behind to give their children a better life.
What happened to Jaiteh was monstrous but perhaps even more monstrous was the lack of surprise that so many felt as yet another ugly light was shone over the country. Here, in the purported land of St Paul, a land known in the most-read book on earth as one of hospitality and kindness, a man was sacrificed at the altar of progress. A decision was made by the person who chose to leave him in the middle of the road. A decision that he now probably only regrets because it has come back to bite him in his Burberry-clad buttocks.
This is what happens when a sector is allowed to flourish like cancer, unchecked and unchallenged: we turn men into gods and then show surprise when they inevitably start acting like them by playing wantonly with people’s lives. This is the legacy of a people who have allowed modern slavery to grow without care and concern. This man cannot be allowed to be a casualty of a callous, soulless system that values money even over life.
Say his name: his name is Jaiteh.