Chances are you’ve already seen the shaky, cell phone camera
footage of a young man scaling the side of a building to save a four-year-old
dangling from the fourth-storey balcony. (For my American friends, that means
he was five floors from the ground.) Mamoudou Gassama fled Mali when he was
still in his teens. He made his way across the Sahara through Niger and Libya,
crossed the Mediterranean to Italy and has been living with his brother in
France since autumn. He arrived in the country illegally and has been working
odd construction jobs, paid in cash because he’s undocumented. Since his heroic
rescue last month, he’s been granted citizenship and offered a paid internship
with a Paris fire brigade. If you haven’t caught the film yet, you really
should check it out. It will amaze you to see what a refugee has to do to be
treated like a human being.
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