My mantra of late seems to be “Oh my god, so many children… somanychildren somanychildren somanychildren.” As I mentioned in previous posts, they’re everywhere. Not only do I live on the middle school compound, but Madagascar just seems to have more of these little people than I’m used to.
This past week has been different. It’s been a continuation of the “somanychildren” mantra, but more positive. Along with about 9 other Peace Corps Volunteers and some talented Malagasy English-speakers, I have been helping to translate for an internationally diverse team of Operation Smile doctors, nurses, and dentists in Antananarivo. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Operation Smile, it’s a charity organization that gives free surgery to people (mostly children under the age of 10) with cleft lips and cleft palates. All of it is funded by donation, and all of the doctors, nurses, dentists, and translators are generously volunteering their time. Though they have been coming back to Madagascar for several years, this year has been particularly exciting for Operation Smile Madagascar. They have officially decided to do two missions a year in Madagascar – one in Antananarivo and one on the east coast in Tamatave. Furthermore, they have a large group of Malagasy nurses and doctors observing so that in the future they’ll be able to independently perform the operations. Oh, and that’s not it. Patient turnout has been phenomenal. We screened nearly 550 patients last week to see if they qualified for surgery.
The Peace Corps volunteers involved in this mission are mostly assigned to one section of the process to translate between Malagasy patients and the English-speaking doctors. I of course, have to go off and do something teacherly. One other volunteer and I weren’t put in the O.R. or paired with a dentist, but assigned to the “student team”. Yeah, you’re probably thinking “I thought we were talking about hospitals, surgeries, and all that medical junk, what’s going on?”
Well, our position means we are working with two high school students from South Africa to and talk to schools in Antananarivo about nutrition. Each morning the South African students, the other PCV – my friend and stage-mate, Mariana — a student team coordinator, and I set out to the day’s school. We leave, arms full of colorfully drawn posters with song lyrics and pictures of the go, grow, and glow food groups (one of which has a vaguely blobish looking brown thing in the glow food group that the Malagasy students keep thinking is a potato. We’re terrible teachers misleading them like that, I know, but we have plans to replace the brown blobish thing with an orange blobish thing and call it tropical fruit.) Both schools we have visited so far were elementary schools and the kids were freaking adorable. I don’t usually get such a high concentration of cute, semi-well behaved kids and I can’t help but suppress an “awwww!” before I make our introductions.
When done, we zip back to the hospital as fast as the terrible Tana traffic will allow us to zip, to translate. For a few hours this afternoon, I sat in the post-op, where all the kids (and some adults) freshly arriving from surgery first came. My task involved fetching the patients’ guardians, explaining their children’s situation – they’re waking up, they may have blood on their mouth – then walking them to the recovery room. For the most part, the parents were stoic and didn’t show much excitement, but still it was amazing to see the transformations of the children from before to after their surgeries. For once I’m okay with all the children surrounding me. Operation Smile is a fantastic organization and makes clear and immediate differences in the lives of their patients and their families.
But it’s late here and Operation Smile isn’t over yet… meaning, I’m tired and I have to wake up at the crack of dawn (literally). So enjoy the photos from Monday.
Oh and P.S. Being in an African hospital at night with half-lit hallways is rather creepy.
Beat Nomad 