Heartbreaking tale of girls who met Pope leaves audience in tears

So last week was all about records of sorts. On one hand, we had a video from our flagship ‘Humans of UAE’ series on Pakistani Ali Mohammed, voted Dubai’s best biryani chef in a 2017 social media poll. On the other hand, we had a fascinating story of two Colombian girls —Valery, eight, and Gabriela, six—whose fathers are serving time in a Dubai jail since February 2016.

One broke the internet and garnered over a million views in a matter of days, while the other was viewed little over 100,000 times in as much time. But if you could ever quantify heartbreaks and if there was a record for the most emotional video ever made in the UAE, then this other less watched video surely stakes a claim.

People virtually wept in the comments section as they went about the roughly six-minute visual story of the two Colombian girls who overcame not only physical barriers to get to Pope Francis (remember the powerful picture?) just as he arrived to conduct UAE’s first papal mass in Abu Dhabi last week, but also life’s bigger odds to let the world know that they had a story to tell.

And to tell that in its entirety consumed three Khaleej Times journalists over two late nights (or early mornings for some). It required my colleague Kelly Clarke’s brilliant reportage, our designer Oscar Yanez’s exceptional human skills in helping us break down the language barrier, and my handy knowledge of filming and editing to present it in a video format.

But even before we had actually begun working on the story, we had spent two hours on the road, from our office in Al

Quoz to a street in Al Barsha just to track down their address of the shared villa, and another four hours to convince the mothers of the two girls why we must be the first to share their story with the world.

And when it finally happened, when they felt they could open up to us, it was well past midnight. We had all skipped our dinners and personally I had missed what could have been (you never know!) a life-changing appointment after twice rescheduling it. But none of us seemed to mind the hunger pangs and the rare Dubai chill as we sat cold in the lawns of their shared villa when they finally agreed to speak over some saccharine coffee from Colombia!

But that wasn’t the end of it. Even though we had the story and the permission to publish it, we didn’t have the very face(s) of the story -- the two little girls who had slept off by then. That meant we had to return the next day.

When I met them just for the video the next afternoon, I knew I had a huge task on hand to be able to portray them in a five-six minute video. They frolicked around in their lawns, cycled on their bike and sang a song for UAE and I was delighted to get some amazing looking shots against the setting sun. But when Valery took out her eighth birthday gift, a white T-shirt with a Minnie Mouse embossed in the front and ‘My Princess’ in the back designed by her dad from his prison cell, it absolutely crushed my heart as a father of a seven-year-old.

You don’t have to be a parent or understand Spanish, their native language, to feel their pain that they have so naïvely kept hidden in their glee.