she is telling you thank you

I just finished my first shift back on the wards, and it wasn't quite what I thought it would be. Truth be told, I'm not sure what I was expecting, but something didn't feel right. Maybe it was the translators. If anything, they're better than the ones we worked with last year in Liberia, but I don't know any of them. I felt like a kid on her first day of school, hesitant to ask for help in case it marked me as a poor student. Maybe it was the way that one supply cart had been set up in the opposite direction to where it stood last year. Countless times, I found myself on the wrong side, looking for something I thought should be there. Maybe it was the names. Unfamiliar on my tongue, I resorted to calling every single one of my patients Bebe, which I'm hoping was French for Baby, and probably wouldn't have mattered anyway, since most of my mamas didn't speak a lick of that particular language.

I'm not sure. Maybe I was expecting it to be perfect. (I tend to put that onus on myself more often than I should.) I guess maybe I thought I would waltz in there and save Benin in one eight-hour shift. Instead I felt like I was treading water, just barely getting things done, lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces and surrounded by languages I couldn't begin to decipher. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I put on my game face and I plunged into that sea.

I took report, asked all the right questions, told the off-going nurses that I was good to go and sent them on their merry way. I looked up forgotten doses, mixed drugs and forced tylenol down squirming babies' throats. I taught a mama how to make salt water for cleaning her baby's sore when they go home, just like I did countless times last year. Take a clean pot. It must not be the same pot you use to cook pepper; a clean one... I danced a little, handed out a couple stickers, and still felt like something was missing.

It came when I finally got a minute to breathe and found a translator who had a while to sit with me and talk to the mama of my sickest little baby. I'd tell you her name, but like I said, I was sticking to the basics and can't for the life of me remember it. She's a beautiful little one, with chubby thighs and creamy brown skin, and her mama spent the day curled up next to her, carefully removing the IV tubing from Bebe's hands every time she tried to cause mischief. When I sat down on the bed next to her, she looked concerned, probably wondering why that busy Yovo (white girl) was finally stopping to talk.

I went through my usual spiel. The surgery went well. She will need lots of medicines which I will give her through that tube in her hand. She will need to rest. This is how you will care for her. This is how your life has just changed. She sat silently, nodding her head with each phrase the translator spoke, her face inscrutable. When I finished, I asked if she had any questions. She thought for a moment, and shook her head. No questions. And it was then that everything made sense again, because her face broke out into that huge grin I've seen so many times before on this ship, the face of a mama whose baby has just been given a chance. She held her hands out towards me in a gesture I haven't seen before, her face wreathed in joy. I turned to see the translator standing next to me with a matching smile.

She says thank you. She is telling you thank you.

And after that, I couldn't bring myself to care whether or not I felt out of place or unsure or imperfect. Because those wards are filled with babies and mamas and men and women who are all being pieced back together, drawn out of the shadows and shown the path back to life. How can I not love being a part of that?