Strikebreakers
Driving to another meeting in Sicily, without much time to spare, we suddenly came across twenty or so burly men who had set up a road block, strikers protesting the closing of the local plant of an oil company and the subsequent loss of jobs. A long line of drivers were arguing that they should be let through: I imagined kids waiting to be picked up at school, aged parents hanging around hospital waiting rooms, concerts, meals and homework missed. But the strikers were adamant. “Wait here till we open the road. This is important to us.” Nevertheless, my driver inched forward until we were alongside the strikers’ leader. “Where are you going? Stay in line with everyone else,” he was told brusquely. “I’ve got the father of Nicholas Green with me, the American child who was shot on the freeway in Calabria. He’s going to give a talk on organ donation at a school,” my driver replied. A skeptical face ducked down by the window, looked at me quizzically, then smiled broadly. “Let this one through,” he said to his pals and waved us on majestically.
This is my son, seven-year old Nicholas Green, of Bodega Bay, California, who was shot in an attempted carjacking in Italy while we were driving on the main road south from Naples on a family vacation. My wife, Maggie, and I donated his organs and corneas, which went to seven very sick Italians, four them teenagers. Two of the seven were going blind, all the others could have died at any time. In the next ten years, organ donation rates in Italy, which were then just about the lowest in Europe, tripled – a rate of increase no other country came close to – so that thousands of people are alive who would have died. All around the world his story brought people’s attention to the acute shortage of donated organs and became known as ‘The Nicholas Effect.’