THE BLUE CHILD

Perhaps not everyone knows that, amidst the waters of the ocean, there is a wonderful island: it has beaches of fine white sand where palm trees grow, green and pleasant countryside, clean rivers flowing down from high mountains with their peaks always snow-capped. On this fantastic island there are all the landscapes of the world, in fact, it is a small world where all the animals and many plants still exist. Even the people who live there think it is a wonderful island: there are white people, black people, yellow people like the Chinese, red people like the Indians and Eskimos living in the ice. On this island there is no pain, no hunger, no poverty: everyone is friends, they help each other and the children play with their differently coloured companions and have a lot of fun. Not everyone has the same habits but they respect each other. To remind themselves that they can live together without giving up their own ways of life, they tell a story that really happened: a Chinese man invited a white man to lunch. But the white man did not know how to eat with chopsticks: so the Chinese gave him a fork and the white man could taste the Chinese man's delicious food. When the children heard this story they understood that they had different habits but that none was better than another and above all that people had a heart to love, a mouth to laugh and these had no colour; at school they taught the children that inside everyone there was a HEART: this heart thought, played, loved and was a very important part.

But one bad day everything changed: whites said they were better than blacks, yellows said they were smarter than Indians, Indians said they were smarter than Eskimos. The children no longer played together, nobody told the story of the Chinaman's lunch anymore, and the school said that people of different colours should not live together!!! Everyone was always angry and it got to the point where they lived in different places and no longer met. The island was no longer as beautiful as it used to be: the plants dried up, the animals hid, the rivers became dirty.

One afternoon a group of children met on an old country road: they were of different colours and immediately started teasing and teasing each other. They were about to hit each other when a little voice was heard shouting: ‘Stop! Stop!’ It was a child who had spoken, but a peculiar child: his skin, his hair, his clothes were... blue! ‘Why did you want to hit each other?’ But the children were too astonished to answer until someone said: ‘Because we don't have the same colour’ - ‘Then beat me too. I'm different from everyone.’ Said the blue child; but the children were undecided: they did not know whether he was a real child and thought to ask him where he lived. ‘I have to build my house now. Do you want to help me?’