At midday today I was labouring up the hill from the supermarket, loaded with packets of groceries in both hands and on one shoulder. It was hot and I was sweating, concentrating only on the road ahead, wanting to get home to my depressed –and depressing- husband.

A man in dirty clothes was sitting in the shade of a tree by the roadside; he mumbled something to me that I wasn’t going to acknowledge. In this harsh city there are so many like him, drunks and vagrants who normally ask handouts. Still I looked back towards him, and his words made sense once I saw what he was on about.

He had said: “Look at my baby ma’am”, and his baby was a sleeping puppy cradled peacefully on his lap. I smiled and said: “What a beautiful baby”, and as I continued my walk I held the picture of the man and the puppy in my mind and my heart, I thought: The world is still OK. or as we say in Arabic الدنيا لسه بخير .

In this cruel and rough country, where a man could kill another for a cell phone, where babies are raped, killed or thrown in garbage bins, there is a scruffy man, who cradles a little dog and calls it his baby. Mercy and kindness still go around, and life is definitely still worth living.