A couple of weeks ago, I was in grey, drab and rainy Brussels but, lo and behold, one Saturday morning, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds. And. It. Stayed. There.

The sun shone brightly and happily for the rest of the day. Which, of course, changes the mood in a way that can never be appreciated in countries where grey, drab and rainy is the exception. It’s almost sinful to stay inside in a land so deprived of natural Vitamin D, so it was decided that we’d go for a stroll in the woods of La Hulpe. For some reason, this name evoked images of wolf packs running around in forestry land. As it turned out, not one wolf was to be seen but cub scouts were out in packs. With their scarves and caps and badges on their shirts, hundreds of laughing and joshing kids were following their leaders on trails, to put their motto to practice: be prepared.

Anyway, it was here, as we walked farther and farther away from Baden Powell’s crowd, that we stumbled upon a tiny old farmhouse which nestles an artistic treasure trove: an exhibition of the illustrator Jean-Michel Folon.

I confess, I had never heard of him but the themes of his watercolour works – mostly from the 1970s and 1980s – seemed so very familiar that I could have sworn he had just painted them last year.

La Jungle de Villes, for example, depicts how cities are turning into grey blobs of concrete asphyxiating each other; La Morte d’un Arbre illustrates a sawn-off tree stump and the death of the vast network of roots beneath that stump. Really, he could have been painting Malta.

Then, in the midst of this stark environmental wreckage, there was a painting of a thumb and an index finger holding a flame of light: Un Espoir, he called it, a hope. No matter the growing ugliness around us, Folon is saying: we live by hope.

It is in this spirit, therefore, that I shall write about the story of Jaiteh Lamin, the 32-year-old Ghanaian migrant who fell the height of multiple storeys while working at a construction site. His co-workers on site were quick to pull him out: it was nothing short of a miracle that he survived. He was carried on a makeshift wooden stretcher to the contractor’s van and rushed to hospital. But half way there, Lamin says he was thrown out of the van and left by the roadside with instructions to tell the police he was hit by a car.

There are so many things wrong with this story and none need spelling out. I have hope – a little espoir – that, by the time this goes to print, whoever abandoned Lamin in agony on a pavement will have at the very least expressed his sorrow.

I want to, however, focus on the people who, a few moments later, drove past and spotted a man doubled up and crouched on the pavement. They all called for help and did not leave his side till the paramedics arrived.

In a world which seems to be collapsing in values, there are lots of people who still carry the little flame of light- Kristina Chetcuti

I am sure that those who stopped to help do not think of themselves as heroes. They did what any decent person would do. In a world which seems to be collapsing in values, there are lots of people who still carry the little flame of light.

One of them, Caroline Galea, followed up with a visit to hospital where Lamin is being treated for grievous back and arm injuries and is also setting up a fundraising campaign with Victims Support Malta to support him.

She wrote on her Facebook, upset, to say how this cannot be seen as an isolated incident; how migrants like Lamin working on construction sites are being paid €50 to work 11 hours a day. “We are a society and when these things continue to happen it is not only a reflection on an individual but on us all… Malta is a concrete jungle being built by slaves.”

We are part of this city jungle.

Can we fight it? Can we stop it? Increasingly it’s become clear that it’s hard to win the battle against the bulldozers, the contractors, the ministers and rampant corruption.

But we can do what those who stopped to help Lamin did and fight the moral fight: treating fellow human beings as we would ourselves, going back to the basics of the scouts’ motto and always be prepared to lend a hand and understanding that the sheer greed of the construction industry frenzy can never buy us happiness. We can keep doing that until the collective becomes stronger than the greed of a bunch of individuals.

I’ll end with a nudge to one of Folon’s illustrations, La Mer. It depicts a man with a sun hat, sitting on the edge of a beach, staring into a distance, while the waves gently lap the sand and his feet.

Perhaps we’ve forgotten this kind of contentment.