A THOUGHT FOR OUR FUTURE GENERATION

Mr. Antoine Kufedjian from Bell Canada, Canada, wrote:

We were in the sixties and lived in Beirut (Hawuz al-Sa'atiyeh). I was a kid at the time and our neighbour, an old lady, was sick with no relatives or resources. So my mother called our Family Doctor to come and visit her and told him she would pay for the visit. The Doctor came in, took good care of the old lady, gave her sample medicine for free and did not accept to be paid. More to it, he called us the next morning to enquire about his patient. So was "al-marhoum" Dr. Salim Yousef Hatem, son of Hammana. He was called "Abu al-fakir". He had a clinic at Kantari, on the borderline between the luxury and poor neighbourhoods near the old presidential palace. He dedicated a day per week for the poorest. The latter could pay LL 2.50 or nothing; it did not really matter. He would only accept any money if they insisted for their own pride. They would all get free samples… Allah yirhamo…..

Later on in my life, I started working in the Ministry of PTT and met another Hammana son, George Hatem, who was the head of my department. I learnt years later that he was the cousin of Dr. Salim. I had the chance to work with him closely. He taught me, by example, integrity, hard work and professionalism (yes, rare but they existed in civil servants). He afterwards became General Director of the PTT and one of the rare General Directors working double shifts and leaving the position poorer than entering it. Later, during the war, he was appointed by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) as a Regional Manager based in Athens.  When called upon by the Ministry of PTT, he did not hesitate to come back in the heat of the war to give a hand at a time when non-politicized Lebanese were considered as abnormal. When the war ended, his first act was to renovate his house in Hammana, which was shackled by the war. He still visits it religiously every year. Besides being my professional mentor, he and I also had the chance to become family friends.

These two friends from Hammana are living proof that values have and will always be the thing people will remember vividly after the dust has settled. A thought for our future generation.