It is six o'clock in the morning. You are asleep in my left arm and I am learning the art of one-handed typing. Your mother, more tired yet more happy than I've ever known her, is sound asleep in the room next door. When you're older we'll tell you that you were born in Hong Kong in the lunar year of the pig. "It's a boy, so lucky," our neighbours told us. They said you were the first baby to be born in the block this year. This, they told us, was good Feng Shui, in other words, a positive sign. Naturally your mother and I were only too happy to believe that. Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out. I am pained by the memory of each suffering child I have come across on my journeys as a journalist. To tell you the truth, it's nearly too much for me to even think of the children being hurt and abused and killed. Last October, in Afghanistan, when you were growing inside your mother, I met Sharja, aged twelve, motherless, fatherless, guiding me through the grey ruins of her home. Everything was gone, she told me. There is another memory of Rwanda, and the churchyard where I found a mother and her three young children huddled  together where they'd been beaten to death. The children had died holding on to their mother. Daniel, these memories explain some of the protectiveness I feel for you, and the occasional moments of blind terror when I imagine anything bad happening to you. We can see that this text is written to   _  .
the author's wife the author's neighbour Daniel a suffering child