guarantee

Every single day, broken babies are born into this world. Here in Togo, no one knows how many. Often, no one marks their coming but their mamas and the village chief, the one who hands down the proclamation that this baby is cursed, that he cannot stay in the village or the sickness will spread. And so many babies are abandoned, left to die because they were born with a cleft lip or clubbed feet or crossed eyes. In the West, we can't comprehend this. We've gotten to the point where people with special needs are being referred to as "differently abled," and this is a good thing. It reminds us that they are human, that their lives are worth just as much as ours.

Here in West Africa, things are often so different.

Which is why, I think, I'm so giddy when we take care of the littlest ones. When their mamas love them enough to scrape together the money for transport to Lomé, to wait in long lines at screenings in the blistering sun, to endure days and weeks on board the ship while their babies get better. I love knowing that they will never have to know that other life, the one filled with ridicule and shame. The one where they can't make friends, can't go to school, can't find love and get married.

And most of all, I love knowing that they'll know any life at all. Because for Kossi, life wasn't a guarantee.

He was born five days before we met him, in a hospital way up north. Doctor Russ works there, a man well known to Mercy Ships, and when he saw the growth on Kossi's tongue, how the brand new baby couldn't suck and couldn't get milk, he e-mailed us right away. The surgeon's schedule was already full, but everyone involved knew that we had to at least see Kossi; saying no meant that he would starve to death, sharing a fate with so many other of these cast-aside babies.

When he arrived, our littlest man couldn't close his mouth over his tongue. It's a good thing newborns have to breathe through their noses, because there wasn't enough room in his mouth for much other than that growth. We didn't know exactly what we were dealing with, so we decided to do a CT scan of his head and neck to make sure it wasn't a tumor that extended any further. Since he was so small, making sure he stayed still was easy; I swaddled him tightly in a receiving blanket (the only one I could find in the entire hospital) and started a pump that delivered milk through the tube we'd placed in his nose, right to his stomach.

It worked like a charm and Kossi slept through the entire thing, his whole body fitting into the part of the CT bed meant just for the patient's head. The next day, Kossi had surgery and returned to the wards where his mama and papa were waiting. Instead of the mass on his tongue, there were just a few sutures. Instead of a death sentence, life spread out in front of him.

Kossi's still struggling to learn how to breastfeed, and since his family lives so far out of town in a village where formula isn't really available, (even if they had the money to buy it) we need to make sure he's a champ at it before we can send him home. Which means that we get to keep him for a few more days, bundled up in his blankets in his little corner of B Ward where his mama watches over him.

And every time I catch her eye, she looks up at me, the scars on her cheeks lifting with her smiles, and she moves aside the blanket so I can see his little face.

Because she knows I love him, almost as much as she does.