After Tabaski, life continued on the upswing. To start with, we continued eating sheep meat for the next three weeks. I’ve since found out that this makes many people, mostly old men that I come across in office situations, very angry. They sit during lunch and shovel the meat into their mouths, muttering about how ridiculous it is that we’re being served meat AGAIN and all they really want is a big vat of fried fish, or as they call it, real food. They complain and complain and make a lot of grumbling noises. I have issues with this. First of all, if they want the fish so bad, I think they should just figure out how to cook it themselves. That’s what I do when I have cravings for things like popcorn, guacamole, or brownies: I find a way to make it work, even if that means I mix cocoa powder with butter and sugar and just make some kind of weird batter that somehow satisfies me. But second of all, their pain is my happiness. I try not to talk to myself about how, at the end of the day, I’m just not a big fish person. But the more I admit that to myself, the harder the next 18 months will be, so mostly, I just eat the fish every day. Except for the three weeks after Tabaski, when all of my dreams come true and I just stuff my face without thinking.
I also had the chance to participate in a really cool project during November. Global Smile Foundation, an organization that travels around the world doing cleft lip surgeries, came to my city and called upon some Peace Corps volunteers to give them some extra support. No one really knows what causes cleft lips and palates – some say it’s merely genetic, others say it’s often linked to a deficiency during birth – but the fact remains that in America, they’re almost always corrected immediately in small children. In Senegal, on the other hand, there is only one team of doctors who do the surgery (which apparently gives them rock-star status... I told my host family I was helping with cleft lip surgeries and they knew the names of the doctors, despite none of them ever having a cleft.) Kids with clefts grow up with difficulties eating and speaking, not to mention social ostracization. One family we spoke to brought their 25 year old daughter. They had not sent her to school, thinking her cleft evidenced a lack of intelligence, and she hardly left the house. All of this due to lack of an extremely simple surgery – a surgery that organizations like Global Smile Foundation come in and perform for free.
I had no idea what to expect when I showed up the first day, but soon found myself exercising one of the few skills I’ve picked up in life: holding babies. Or more specifically, weighing babies during their pre-surgery consultations. The second baby I touched threw up all over me.
But when I returned to the hospital for my next shift with the project, I found all of the other Peace Corps volunteers rushing around wearing OR scrubs and juggling medical equipment. I was flabbergasted; I’d assumed we’d be helping with mostly administrative tasks, but here we were, being allowed to participate in the thick of it. I was even invited to observe some operations directly, but since I knew that I would undoubtedly pass out and maybe even fall into some sort of coma at the sight of blood because I am such a strong, fearless person, I declined and stayed in the PACU. The PACU is where they brought patients after the operations, to let them sleep off the anesthesia and monitor the vitals for a short bit. To be fair, I did get squirted with blood once, due to an unruly child who became aggressive with his IV. Luckily, Coke and cookies saved me from passing out. I also had the essential jobs of downloading Rihanna and Willow Smith music videos to distract the disoriented or frightened kids, as well as making age and sex appropriate outfits from suitcases of donated clothes for each patient. I took it very seriously. Personal shopper to the passed out.
The week was just really great though. The team did about 10 surgeries a day, but each day would stretch out to about 12 hours – which meant they were long, but we also had a lot of opportunities to get to know the kids and families that we were treating, not to mention share a lot of stories about Senegal with the visiting GSF team. And all of the Americans were just so wonderful to work with. Peace Corps work is, by nature, pretty slow: taking the time to integrate takes a lot of time, and the projects we end up enacting usually don’t show results until after we’ve left. In that respect, it was a lovely change of pace to work with a project that produced visible results so quickly. And watching nearly every single mother well up when she saw her child’s corrected lip or palate after the surgery really sealed the deal: the difference being made, not only physically but in the lives of these kids and families, was obvious.
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