hope

It's a little after three in the morning, and the wards are quiet. I'm working my last night shift in A Ward, since one of their nurses called out sick, so I'm not taking care of little Taslim tonight. I checked on her a little while ago, and she was fast asleep, the steri-strips holding her top lip together looking for all the world like little kitten whiskers. I'm also happy to report that the oldest of my nine patients tonight is fourteen. It would be the understatement of the year to say that I'm relived not to be in charge of any grown men with hernias.

Don't get me wrong; general surgery is an important part of what we do here, because sometimes transforming a life isn't as dramatic as rebuilding a face or straightening crippled feet. Sometimes it's the unseen troubles, a hernia that's caused years of pain for a man, destroying his ability to work and provide for his family. When we can step in and fix that, we give life to that family again. But really, at the end of the day, I'm a pediatric nurse. Call me crazy, but I'd much rather be wrestling with a three year-old who's bent on kicking me in the face because she doesn't want her temperature taken (true story, that) than watching a grownup sleep quietly. Seriously, where's the fun in that?

The little ones here in A Ward have all been here long enough due to different complications with their plastic surgeries that they know the drill. (Whether or not they choose to comply with said drill is entirely up to the whim of the moment.) There's something incredibly endearing about a one-and-a-half year old who sees you coming with the monitor and smiles up at you as he holds out his chubby finger for the oxygen probe. Or the six year-old who insists it's cold enough to be wearing a knitted winter hat and then needs to be tucked in when he falls asleep and kicks off his covers.

I'm sitting here, reading down this list of kids on my clipboard, and it's like reading a promise.

Instead of ridicule and stares and whispers behind their backs, they're being rebuilt now. Extra digits removed, fingers burned by fire made straight again, wounds covered, fingers created from webbed masses of skin and bone. These are the things that make you hated here, the things that keep you from school because of the fear that other people feel when they look at you.

Here on the ship, we speak to them of a new reality. We hold their mangled hands, touch their scarred cheeks where skin has hardened like wax, snuggle them into our laps no matter what they look like. We change their bandages, help them bathe, look them in the eye and acknowledge their worth. We who are filled with the love of Jesus can't help pouring that out on our patients and the result is that these nine names on my clipboard are now kids who fully believe that they deserve that love.

It seems like such a small thing, but it's everything. I've been at this for more than three years now, and I'm blinking back tears as I sit here and think about what this all really means.

This place is a promise.