Garbagemen often find the most unusual things as they work their routes, but one trashman found something that is far more than just unexpected. It was inhuman.
Viral video blasted out last week after a garbageman in the Nazi Abad neighborhood of Tehran, Iran, heard some unusual sounds coming from a dumpster on his route, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
It would have been easy to just ignore any strange things about the dumpster, but the sounds made him want to stop what he was doing and root around in the refuse to see what was going on.
It was a good thing he did, too, because the trashman’s curiosity almost certainly saved the life of a tiny baby boy who had been jammed in a plastic bag and thrown away like garbage.
In the harrowing video, the hero trashman can be seen emptying some of the contents of the trash bin onto the street only to see one black bag moving as if something inside was alive.
As a crowd gathered to watch, the plastic bags can be seen moving around and in short order a tiny human arm and leg can be seen poking out of the bag.
Someone in the crowd finally cautiously stepped up to the bag, unwrapped it, and found a newborn with its umbilical cord still attached.
According to the reports, after the discovery, the man called the city’s emergency services, and once rescue workers arrived, they cleaned the baby and put him in a warm blanket.
According to a May 24 report from Iran Front Page News, an English-language news site licensed by the Iranian government, the tenacious little fellow is in stable condition at a local hospital.
A few days ago this baby was found in a dumpster, today Alhamdulilah recovering https://t.co/d5IkVKkq6h
— PeyM Jalebi (@peyjalebi14) May 26, 2022
Sadly, child abandonment is at a crisis level in Iran, the New York Post reported.
Government officials say that up to 1,000 children under 3 are abandoned to the care of the government every year. But activists say the actual number is higher.
The problem was noted as far back as 2018 when an Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, reported that poverty is so pervasive in Iran that many are unable to care for children.
“The dark reality is that these babies’ parents, living in poverty, are so desperate that they are left with no option other than abandoning their newborn,” a report on the group’s website stated at the time.
But the problem of abandonment is less worrisome than the problem of children being bought and sold, the group added.
“There are, of course, no records on the increasing number of children being sold and purchased. Many such children fall victim to a mafia-like network, ending up living the life of crimes or even being traded for harvesting their body organs,” the report stated.
Do you think someone needs to be arrested for this?
Unfortunately, babies are found in garbage dumpsters all too often. In January, a young mother was arrested for allegedly tossing her newborn baby in a dumpster in Hobbs, New Mexico, KFOX-TV in El Paso, Texas, reported.
That was not the only case from here in the U.S.A. In others, a newborn girl found abandoned in a dumpster was later reunited with a father who claimed he never even knew he got the baby’s mother pregnant; and another baby was found abandoned on top of a garbage can in Chicago in 2019.
