Wayne Ingram held a photograph in his hands and could not stop looking at it.
It was 2003, he was in Bosnia as a sergeant in the British Army, and that photograph showed Stefan Slavic, a boy barely four years old with a facial cleft so severe that he had been given, at best, a couple of years to live. In place of a nose, a mass of bone and flesh was slowly pushing his eyes toward the sides. Milos, the boy’s father, a wounded war veteran, only wanted to know whether any foreign soldier could help.
Wayne had neither the money nor the authority to promise anything. He promised anyway. Thirteen years, five surgeries and 160.000 pounds sterling later —paid for with football matches, donations from strangers and even the sale of his own motorcycle— Stefan is 26 years old, plays keyboard in a Bosnian folk band and wrote to Wayne: “I love you, my friend, forever”.
