Time for something inspiring...

[i was looking for something good to end the week with but couldn't find anything that really did it for me so i decided to "promote" this post from earlier in the week... it makes me smile every time i read it and smiling is good, right...?]

in the often ugly course of daily events, it's delightful to be able to post something like this... even cooler is that it came about because of a gay activist and a homophobe working together... i dare you to look at that young face and not smile back...

Ayad al-Sirowiy came to America this week hoping doctors here could remove the war embedded in his face.

Thirteen years old, small and skinny, Ayad was severely burned and blinded in one eye when an American cluster bomb blew up in his face at the beginning of the Iraq war.



A cluster bomb left Ayad al-Sirowiy blind in one eye and peppered his face with scars. He hides them by wearing sunglasses, even in his sleep.

The explosion blasted thousands of fragments into his skin and left scars deeper than that. The village boys tease him, calling him "Mr. Gunpowder." Even on sweltering days, Ayad wraps a scarf around his face when he leaves home, and most nights he sleeps with sunglasses still on.

But all that may change.

On Friday, Ayad and his father walked into a laser surgery clinic in Washington to begin a series of treatments to clear his skin.

Ayad curled up on the doctor's chair, eyeing the business end of a washing machine-sized laser.

"Ma, ma, ma," he wailed.

It was the end of one odyssey, which began in a mud hut in southern Iraq, and the start of another.

Doctors say a full recovery for Ayad may be a long shot, but at the urging of a lawyer who read about his plight and labored for more than a year to bring the boy to America, top dermatologists and cornea surgeons are willing to try.

What finally got Ayad here was an unlikely alliance between Joe Tom Easley, a lawyer and well-known gay activist, and Robert Reilly, a Defense Department adviser reviled in gay circles for an article he once wrote calling homosexuality "morally disordered."

Mr. Reilly used his influence to get Ayad into the United States, where the boy joined a small but growing circle of Iraqi children who have been airlifted to the country for medical help.

"People ask me why this boy, why help him, when there are so many others worse off," Mr. Easley said in an interview. "I tell them, well, I don't know about the other boys. But I do know about Ayad."

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