tangled

It's a strange time on the wards right now. I suppose it always slows down a bit during the summer, but it seems like it's more than usual this year. The wards are emptying out, the combination of only one type of surgery and women healing without any of the usual major complications making it impossible to keep beds full. Not that I'm complaining; it's incredible to see our ladies dancing so soon after surgery, going home to their new lives in their new dresses with their new hope held firmly in their hearts. It's just that, for me, the charge nurse who doesn't really work with the VVF ladies, things aren't so fun.

We kept it up for a while, with Tani and Gafar and Josee providing enough work that we could keep D Ward open and humming. But Tani left yesterday in the darkness just before dawn. Climbed into a bus with thirty other patients and headed north, back to her village where I don't know what will happen to her. She's spent fifty-six days with us, the recipient of almost exclusive attention and constant repetition of our favorite phrases: I love you! I'm beautiful! But now she's home, in a village full of people who might not see her the same way we do. Who might look at her face and still see the maimed little girl who left, the absence of a right eye, the scars snaking across her skin. They might not see her intelligence, her beautiful smile and the sparkle in her left eye. They might make fun of her, just like they used to.

It's so hard to let them go, sometimes.

And it's not just Tani. We sent Gafar to the Hospitality Centre yesterday, too. Away from our constant love and craft ideas, he's withdrawn back into his shell in just twenty-four hours. They called me to see him in the outpatient clinic today where he sat, head low, refusing to meet the nurse's eyes. His ear and eye were swollen, the obvious product of a bandage pushed aside, and when he finally looked up at me I could read the guilt in his good eye, mixed in with what could only be sadness. I think he misses us.

It's so hard to know how best to help them, these kids. Do we keep them in the hospital forever? Shelter them and love them and tell them over and over how precious they are? Or do we let them out, send them home and out of our sight and hope for the best. If Gafar is any indication, I probably don't want to know how Tani's doing.

And the thing is, it's not just them. It's so many of the kids we send home. It's Anicette, who left us and starved to death. It's Maomai, whose story I'll probably never fully know, but who also didn't survive living at home despite everything we did. It's Aissa, whose Uncle Jean missed planting season while he was watching over her in the hospital, and so now they have no food. It's probably a hundred more kids whose stories I haven't heard, and there's nothing I can do about it.

I think it's just a part of this life and this work, the not knowing, but it never really gets easier. It's going to be almost be a relief to see the general surgery patients next week, people who come and go in just a few days. Patients whose names I barely have time to learn. Certainly no time to fall in love and get my heart all tangled up in their stories.



(And knowing me, it'll be about three seconds before I'm wishing myself right back in the middle of all that tangling.)