An amazing miracle

After 16 Days, a Cry From the Ruins: 'Sir, Please Help Me!'

When the walls crumbled around her into mountains of broken concrete and twisted steel, Reshma Akter Begum fell and fell and fell.

Where one second she had been on the third floor, she now found herself in a basement prayer room that would prove her sanctuary and her salvation.

Over the next 16 days and seven hours in the often sweltering, pitch-black room, three other people she had worked with in the eight-story factory building died one by one.

Words fail me

This was the first thing I read this morning. The sheer brutality and kindess embodied in this story leaves me speechless.

From horror to hope: Boy's miracle recovery from brutal attack

You cannot die! You cannot die!" the father mumbles to the bloodied, mutilated boy who lies unconscious on his lap.

His hands press down on the boy's slashed-open stomach to keep the insides from spilling out. He sobs convulsively.

"Listen to me! You cannot die!" he repeats his morbid mantra. "If for nothing else, to exact justice."

The two are on a rickshaw headed to a hospital in Dhaka. It's not the most effective way to transport a dying child through the cramped, congested streets of the Bangladeshi capital. But it's all that the impoverished father can afford.

Hours earlier, four men had surrounded the 7-year-old boy, bound his hands and feet and cracked open his head with a brick. They held him down and took a switchblade to his throat. They sliced his chest and belly in an upside down cross.

And in a final brutal act, they hacked him sideways, chopping off his penis and his right testicle.

"It's amazing that he lived," a doctor would later say. "I'm really surprised he didn't bleed to death prior to getting to the hospital."

He was only seven years old at the time. Read the article. Educate yourself on the brutality of forced begging. See what a concerted effort by a team of individuals can do to help the situation. And see what you can do to help other children like this boy at CNN's Operation Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery page.