smile

I was sitting at the desk inputting new patients into the computer this morning when a little brown hand snaked past my elbow and started hitting random letters on the keyboard. I looked down into the wide eyes of one of our sassier plastic surgery patients, Lotoufiath. She was burned by a pot of boiling oil, and as a result, her left armpit used to be a mass of scar tissue. Now her entire torso is a mass of bandages, a splint makes her arm stick out from her body at a ninety degree angle, and she runs around the ward without a care in the world. Apparently, she also likes computers. I used my limited supply of Fon to tell her that she wasn't allowed to mess with my charting, thankyouverymuch (which actually works out to me just saying no; eeyo.) She pouted for a minute and then pointed to the paper on my clipboard.

It's the list we get every week, the list of hospital admissions. Names, ages, problems and the solutions we've dreamed up. Lotoufiath pointed to one of the names and I read out the planned surgery. Temporalis muscle flap. Her eyes widened, and a look of intense concentration dropped over her face. Slowly, she copied my sounds. Tem....por...alis.....mu...scle....flap? I gave her a hug and told her gangi, good.

We spent the next ten minutes or so bent over the paper while she poked her little finger at the longest words. One after the other she mastered words like z-plasty and mandibulectomy and zygoma, parroting back to me the sounds of my language, just like I do to her when she teaches me to say hello.

When I put the paper away, she frowned, not quite ready to finish her quest for medical English. I lifted her chin with my finger, and used one of her own words. Konu, I told her. She looked quizzical and flipped her hand palm up, the universal sign for I want to know what that means here in West Africa.

Smile, I told her, konu means smile.

She darted away across the ward, placated by this offering, a word she could actually use. (Words like ameloblastoma, while they do have a nice ring, hardly get much play in everyday conversation.) I heard her from her spot near bed twelve, home to a little boy on crutches, passing on her new knowledge.

Smile, she told him, in English. He stared blankly back at her until she burst into laughter and grabbed the corners of his mouth. Konu!

They made their way back to the desk and stood on either side of my chair while I continued typing my information into the computer, the words a little less flat now that I had heard them rolling off the tongue of a fuzzy-headed Beninoise girl. And every so often, when I got too serious about my work, a little hand would pat my arm, a little hand would snake around my neck and pull my head down so a little tongue could whisper into my ear.

Smile Tante Alice! Konu!