The Orange Ball

The 2021 Chapter Book category winner of The Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature.

I will resend these letters to you, so that you may read them and see how things are reversed after twenty years. I am writing to you now from my clinic in the village, and you receive them from me while you live in a very big city, in a country very far from our village.
I just want to tell you: I wish I had attended that match!

There is a secret, in those forgotten villages throughout the area of ​​our Arab homelands, isolated, old, and distant villages. There is an intimate relationship with a distinctive warmth and tenderness that wraps its borders, it’s a relationship that grew from a long time ago until our present days, which makes us reflect again on our modern social behaviors, which sometimes happen to be very cold, extremely expensive, and negative. In this text, the writer reviews Wissam’s strong memory. The eight-year-old hero of the story in this village remembers the names of all the characters of the village, where everyone knows everyone. He unites them including the village’s baker, the old grandma, the butcher, the teacher in a basketball game.

It shows how a childlike Wissam possesses persistence and confidence, to make a direct change in society, to personally motivate its members by name to make change.

The text is simple like the villagers themselves. The reader goes on a journey and learns about Wissam’s daily events by reading Wissam’s letters to his brother who study medicine and lives in the city.

We see one-sided letters from Wissam, without seeing his brother’s replies, he can express what is on his mind intelligently despite the simplicity of his thinking and his previous belief that basketball is the same as football.