Home again, home again, jiggety jig

For a week I’ve been learning my new job of nurse educator, planning ahead for next year, organizing the desk that will soon be mine.  The piles of paperwork have slowly diminished and the ever-growing to-do list I’ve been compiling is already half crossed-out.  The rest of the list will take a bit more time, I think.  I’ll be dividing my time between nurse educator and working on the wards, and so for now it’s time to learn the job I haven’t done yet.

Throughout the week it was a bit of a strange feeling to walk by the wards and look in from the outside.  I didn’t know the nurses in blue that bent over the beds to assess and medicate, to try out Krio and Mende with the patients and be a part of healing.  I didn’t know the woman who waved to me from the bed as she nursed her baby, her pressure garment tight on her head above burn scars that streaked down her neck.  I didn’t know the mischievous escapee from the plastic surgery ward that came to my office to visit again and again, hand outstretched in a continual wave from a hand brace, begging me to come and play with him.  The translators remembered me by name, welcomed me home, and eagerly asked when I would be coming back to the ward.  I told them, honestly, that I wasn't sure but I promised to work with them again as soon as I could.

This weekend the wards became mine again.  I was called in to work as a nurse on D ward - land of nasogastric tubes and steri-strip-whiskered lips and suction and dressings, the ward I worked in during the first few months of our time in Sierra Leone.  Life on the ward puts all the paperwork and planning into perspective and gives it a fresh purpose.  

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I realized I was home.

It might have been the smile on Isata's face when she looked in the mirror to see her new jaw after I took the bulky dressing off.  It might have been the guilty look from 5-year-old Kadi when I discovered her once-sterile thigh dressing half pulled off, or the pleading in Temne for her papa's rice when I chased her around her bed with an NG feed.  It might have been the toddler popo securely on my back with a sheet, drowsily drooling down my scrubs as I went from bed to bed to finish my daily vital signs.  It might have been the mama who patted me in church the next morning, as I danced past with Kadi on my back, who attempted to claim my skirt for her own and told me I dressed like "fine African woman."

I don't know when it happened exactly.  There's not a specific moment I can define and pin down.  All I know is that I'm right back where I belong.