my heart in my mouth

From Sunday December 14th through Thursday the 18th, I was away from site to help at the Hopital Regional in Thies with the week-long Operation Smile mission to identify and offer free reparatory surgeries to people with cleft lips or cleft palates. If you haven’t heard about Operation Smile, check it out: http://www.operationsmile.org/

This was their first trip to Senegal, and they had sent out a message a few weeks prior to their arrival, via our Peace Corps Country Director, asking for PCV help in translating, since most of the doctors and Operation Smile team didn’t speak French, let alone any local languages. I went through the whole gamut of emotions that week, but my experience was overall a very positive one, and I was proud of the collaborative efforts that not only Peace Corps Volunteers put into working with the international Operation Smile team, but also TOSTAN and its American and Senegalese volunteers, as they also did a tremendous job coordinating. http://www.tostan.org/

journal excerpt from Sunday December 14

I think I’m still coming down from the high that today was for me. Today - was - amazing. From before 8 a.m. until past 10 pm today I was speaking in different languages from my own, and for about 8 hours of that time, what I said was actually important. I felt needed, and useful, and respected, and you know what? I don’t think that one person at the hospital today called me “Toubab.”

Today was hard. I felt my ego checked several times, my self-esteem crushed and kicked to the curb when people I was trying to translate for didn’t understand, and told me my Wolof was “leerul” (not clear) and I had to call in a more advanced (or native) Wolof speaker to help. I was humbled and given a different sense of perspective, and heartbroken to have to tell Soxna Mbaye’s mom that her daughter wouldn’t be able to get surgery because her deformity was so severe, and that there was a chance that a larger NGO, WorldCare, would be able to see her case and do something, but that chance was so small that I almost didn’t want to mention it. I came across differences in opinion when it came to translating - one photographer with Operation Smile was upset when I told her that I had told some patients that the constant pictures she was taking were for the doctors only, that they wouldn’t show them to anyone else. She told me the photos weren’t for the doctors, but for Operation Smile, to show potential sponsors to get more funding for projects. When I didn’t relay that to the patients and said to her that it was just as easy to tell them the pics were for the doctors, she said she thought I should “tell them the truth.” I just nodded “hmm” and went on to something else. I don’t think I did wrong by the patients by not telling them exactly what the pictures were for, and in my semi-educated-by-nine-months-of-living-in-Senegal opinion, Toubab truths are not always completely understood or appreciated by the Senegalese either, no matter what our intentions.

Tomorrow we’ll see. Surgeries tomorrow. 18 scheduled. I think we might have more PCVs than they need. Anyway I’m going. Despite how badly my phrases might come out, I’m hooked and I want another fix.

from Friday December 19

I haven’t written since Sunday because every day since then has been so full of living that I was too busy to do any recording. I just got back from Thies last night, just after 8, exhausted and feeling totally emotionally spent. On the Alham (rickety mini-bus) ride from Thies to Mbour the driver turned his radio onto ingratiatingly loud Baay Fall religious songs (if you can call them that), and it just broke the last fiber of patience I had left. Sitting there wedged between a ‘mama’ and three other people in my row, my heavy backpack on my lap and my satchel at my feet, I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing down my face. I had spent the week with my heart in my mouth, and though I know I did good, that last day really got to me, with the constant demands for food, water and especially toys, other non-related hospital patients asking me about their other random ailments, the (Senegalese) nurses’ demands for toys for their children, nieces, nephews, whatevers, and some patients’ families wanting still more drugs than the ones they were already given, and everyone just seeming to grab at me from every direction yelling “Ngone! Ngone, Ngone, may ma li! May ma li!!” (Ngone, give me this! Give me that!)
And when I got to the Thies garage all the hustlers were in my face, treating me like a tourist… and there I was again, back at square one.

I just felt like I gave so much of myself this week, and here were all these people still wanting more. Still not satisfied. Still ungrateful. It just made me so terribly sad. Mad, and then so deeply sad.

As the Alham rolled by the dry countryside, I tried to recall the faces I had helped to change. And slowly I was able to dry my tears, as I saw in my mind’s eye Fatiou Diop, and Mahawa Malick, Abdourakhmane and Cheikh, Majigeen and Fatou Diongue, Sidi Sow, and Soda Lo. Their lives will be forever different, and I was able to help make that change a little bit easier.

One of the best parts of the week was being able to tell mothers that their children were out of surgery, to see the relief on their faces and hear their thankful words in Post-Op. “May God reward you for your work,” said one, after I helped translate discharge instructions to a group of cleft lip repair patients.

But I think the best best part for me was making new friends. And seeing them through the whole process, from screening to Pre-Op to OR to Post-Op to discharge. And being told that a patient in Post-Op was asking for me by name -- there was my heart in my mouth again. Malick still needs another operation to complete his new partial nostril (his was a different kind of facial repair) but he seemed to be doing well just out a few hours post-op, and his handshake was balm for my open wounded heart, out in the open as it was for those who needed it, but easy prey for those who only wanted more. His sister seemed like an amazing person as well, and just about made me cry in front of the other patients and nurses as she was thanking me for being there. I told her across Malick’s cot that I wanted to “taq” her as a “xarit” - that is, to make her my friend - and she replied that she was my friend already, “parce que tu es gentille,” she said. Because you are kind.

Right there. Right after we found Malick’s clothes (they had been placed in a different recovery room) with my hand in Malick’s left, because his right was still weak from the IV. Right there, I felt alive, and hopeful. I felt like someone.