Ten thousand hopes

He looked through me far into the past, wrinkled hands tightly holding mine as I squatted beside him in the drizzling rain and mud at the edge of the road.  "I will tell you the story of my eyes," he said.  "Seven years this one cannot see, and five years this one can only see small.  We are come from Sierra Leone with my family during the war."  The light from my headlamp reflected off the cataracts clouding his pupils; a huge smile lit up his face when I welcomed him and told him to wait to see the eye team in the morning, that we had surgeons who will see if they can help him with this problem.   He quoted from the gospel of Mark and prayed fervent blessings on the screening team and all the patients we would see in the coming day.  His wife and son shook my hand, and the small family began singing praise songs in Krio as my translator and I moved away.  I started to sing quietly with them...Yu are da pilla that holds my life...

Beside him a man looked at me, pleading.  I had already spoken with him, seen the displaced femur fracture clearly on the x-ray against the light of my small flashlight, and the surgical rods in his radius now exposed at his left wrist.  It was clear he needed multiple surgeries to move back towards some semblance of normalcy, just as clear that we could not do his surgeries.  I could not tell him yes.  How could I tell him no?  No, we cannot do your surgery, even though you have walked on a badly broken leg for over a year; no, we cannot help.  There was nothing left to say, and so the translator and I stood beside him and prayed for healing.  "Allah has spared me from my car accident for a purpose," he told me, "I am praying to find what that reason is."

My shift started at 1800 the night before screening.  After setting up the building for patients the next day, my fellow nurse Greta and I began screening potential patients in the line outside the gate.  As with other screenings, not all the potential patients there were surgical candidates.  We discussed headaches and acid reflux, basic wound care and how to determine when antibiotics were needed, and I spent at least 15 minutes trying to explain to an elderly man in a car why his swollen legs really meant he needed medical management and oral medication instead of surgery.  It was an early morning of heartache, and there are some that I told no whose faces will stay with me forever.

We are not called to fix all the medical problems of Guinea.  Without a surgical screening it would be impossible to choose the ones we can best help.  There is no denying that many we saw needed medical care we could not give, and to leave so many suffering makes me angry at the injustice - the disparity between those who have access to healthcare for the smallest problems and those who cannot afford care even in emergencies.

As painful as it is to say no, it is just as joyful to say yes to the man who has been waiting for the last few hours and the last ten years to hear "yes, we can take this tumor off of your face."  To see the children with leg deformities who will be able to walk again, the bent and twisted that will become straight, and the blind who soon will see.  We are a surgical specialty hospital, and tomorrow morning the healing surgeries will start.  My prayer is that even Sunday, even with those we could not physically help, that the healing has already started.

As my LandRover drove away at 0615 there were crowds coming to join the screening line, running along the side of the road as though they were afraid to miss their last opportunity at healing.  They came with their hopes tied to their backs in lappas and wrapped in strips of bright african cloth; an overwhelming press of need, an echoing chorus of hope.  And they continued to come in crowds, until the end of the line was out of site and still stretched on.  All through the day as I stayed on ship to be the on-call emergency responder, my pager went off with requests of more wheelchairs or paperwork for the screening site, more gloves, more supplies.  

Initial numbers report at least 3,500 patients were screened in the stadium that day, welcomed together with family members.  Those numbers don't include all the hopeful patients Greta and I had to turn away overnight, the bystanders and Minister of Health and translators watching and praying for a better world, or the family and friends expectantly waiting at home to hear the news.  

It was a day of dreams finally becoming reality.

A day of ten thousand hopes.