enyo gangi

She came almost hesitantly around the door, her eyes searching for her son's. When she saw him, propped up on the shoulder of the recovery room nurse, she came close, peering at his face. Her eyes widened, and she threw her hands up to the sky, one short burst of praise before taking him in her arms and beginning to rock him back and forth, back and forth.

On a stretcher across the room sat the surgeon, divested of his gown and gloves after the operation. The hands that had placed the knots so carefully in the little baby's lip were still, folded in his lap while he watched the scene unfold in front of him. The mama who couldn't take her eyes off her baby's face, patting his back to soothe his cries.

I love watching the way their foreheads wrinkle, he told me. The way they just take it all in, like they can't even understand what they're seeing. I stood by his side, watching the mama and her little baby, a tiny family on the road back from brokenness. Later, I saw the tears fall from the grandma's eyes as she stared at the smooth, unbroken line of the little boy's lip.

And like the surgeon, I sat across the room, just watching them take it all in. Watching them turn his face to the light so they could look again and again, making sure that it was true.

Enyo gangi, Francois' mama told me, knowing that I speak just enough Fon to understand the cry of her heart. Gangi gangi.

It's good. It's so, so good.