Years ago, far away. A team of plastic surgeons volunteer their time and skill, travel to a poor county and hold a skin clinic at a hospital in the capital city. They work on anyone who needs help, free of charge. Money has been donated for the hospital to provide everything they need.
My job is to find people in the rural area where I live with serious skin and tissue problems they can fix. So I talk it up in my community and in neighboring communities. I scour the countryside looking for candidates. It’s bad. People come to me with all sorts of problems. Broken limbs that weren’t set right. Muscular problems caused by I don’t know what. I have to tell them the skin clinic can’t help them. I watch the hope drain from their faces. It sucks.
But then there are people who can be helped and that makes it worthwhile. There’s a teenager in the pueblo who burned his fingers badly. His mom bound them together while they healed and the fingers are sort of fused together. There’s a girl who lives a stone's throw from my house in Las Cuchillas with webbed fingers. There are two infants with extra fingers and toes. They can and will be helped.
And then there are the babies and infants with cleft palates. A cleft palate is a birth defect. There’s a separation in the upper lip, sometimes right up to the nose. It makes the kids look awful and causes problems eating and speaking. It leaves them vulnerable to infections too. I can only imagine what it does their social development. A cleft palate can be fixed, but it requires a serious operation. Most of these families can’t afford anything like that. But this is their big chance. It’s free!
There’s a little kid who lives way out in
the countryside the Evangelicals in El Cuey told me about. It takes me most of
the afternoon to get to him. There’s not even a road to the house; just a muddy
path. And it’s not really a house. Just a one room shelter with a dirt floor,
mattress, table and three chairs. There’s an outside area for cooking over fire
and an outhouse. Some chickens running around. The boy’s mom is initially
suspicious of me, but she lets me see him.
He’s inside, naked on the floor.
Filthy. Skin and bones. He’s looking at me with curious eyes. His face is a
mess. There’s nothing between the bottom of his nose and his lower lip, just
space. I explain to his mom about the doctors visiting and tell her it’s a once
in a lifetime chance to help her son. I tell her the doctors can fix his face,
and that he’ll look handsome and learn to speak normally. She says there’s no
way for her to get to the city. I offer to pay for the bus. I say I can find a
place for them to stay for free. Eventually she agrees.
But when I go to meet
her at the bus depot in El Seibo two days later she’s not there. Her brother or
cousin or somebody is there instead and tells me she’s afraid I’m a kidnapper.
So I bring a woman from my community with me to vouch for me. She seems to buy
in. I get her on the schedule for the last day the doctors will be in country.
This time rather than meeting her at the bus depot, I go to her place early in
the morning to get her moving. But when I get there she won’t go. Says she
can’t. She just can’t.
