Halima is a petite little grandma...not much left but skin and bones and tumor. I can feel each of her ribs through her dress as we embrace - the same bright dress she was wearing when we met in the market between here and Mamou. I have been looking for you, she tells me, for a month I have been looking for you. She takes my hand and places it on her tumor and it throbs warm and alive beneath my bare fingers. This pains me and chuks (pricks) and suffocates me at night...I just want it to be gone. Will you take it away?
Halima, I have been looking for you too.
Every day for the last month I have thought of the morning we met in the market, when we came in the land rovers and asked them to find you, when you rode up on the back of a motorcycle and unveiled your face for your neighbors to see your shame. Every day I think of the first moment I saw you and realized the lump on your face you had covered so carefully was almost as big as your face itself, and I looked past into eyes so full of life and impossibly joyful. When I lie in my bed at night I remember you told me you had trouble breathing when you sleep, and I looked in your throat then and could not see an airway, only tumor and palate, and I wondered how you were breathing still.
My heart remembers you.
I have often thought of the morning I unfolded a square of gauze on the rubber mat of the land rover floor, between the backpacks and baskets of food and guitars, and laid out the laboratory equipment in my island of clean white, when I pressed a lancet to your wrinkled finger and read your blood test in the main street as your whole village watched.
I saw them rejoice with you when we gave you the golden ticket: a patient card with your name and a screening date in four days. I met your husband and your granddaughter and that man who translated for us from French to Pular. I cannot remember his name...do you? What do you remember of that sunny morning when we met? What captures your heart in the darkness as you struggle to breathe?
When your screening date on ship came and went and you were not here, I asked what had happened to you and no one knew. Did you forget to come? When your surgery date arrived and you still had not, I wondered if a night had passed when you finally fell asleep and did not wake back up. Were you lost and alone? I looked for you but I did not see you. I prayed for you...God sees you.
Now you are here and your voice has changed and you still struggle to breathe every night. You tell me the Hope Center is a good place with plenty of milk to make you fat, and you pinch your arm proudly in display. You look at me with a spark still in your weary eyes and ask me to take away the monster that pains and steals your breath.
I send you away with pillows to prop your head at night and paracetamol and a promise of hope. Just a few more days, Halima, and the operating rooms will open again. A few weeks only, and Insha'Allah you will no longer cover your face in shame. After looking for the last month you have finally found us, and I welcome you with open arms.
