This is Alisteria, Alice for short. She came to us from Uganda, brought by a veterinarian after being badly burned when she was little. She was a plastics patient, here to have work on her eye and ear reconstruction.
For the first few weeks she was in our isolation room, being treated for MRSA and having daily dressing changes. Every time you appeared at the window of her door, she would give a little wave, cock her head to the side, and give you a little smile. She patiently tilted her head as you wound the bandage around her head.
She moved to B ward when her infection had cleared and it was time for her first surgery. Many days she sat on her bed and colored, talking quietly to her dad in their own local language.
This week I visited her at the HOPE Center. Instead of a timid smile, these days she greets you with a mischievous smile, and says "I'm fine," knowing you will ask "How are you?" We sat under the shade of a small tree- Donald, one of our max fax guys with a walking stick that he uses to keep the children of the HOPE center in line, Gerril, one of the teenage plastics patients, and Eliezer, another teenage plastics patient.
Alice sat with us for about 5 minutes. She doesn't sit quietly alone anymore. More of her personality comes out. She's a bully. She runs up behind the boys and flicks their ears. Grabs their arms and pulls them out of their chairs. Tries to push them over. Instead of getting mad, they playfully fight back. They tickle her, chase her, and run from her when she pulls branches off the tree to hit them. They playfully wrestle, then ease up when she cries and runs to Donald.
I was telling that story back at the ship later that evening. "She needs discipline," someone said. But there's more to Alice than a lack of discipline.
After she was burned, she was kept in a shack next to her family's home. Two pits were dug in the ground. One for the skin of her face as it fell off. Another for her, should the infection kill her. (There are pictures, but I couldn't access the website to post them here.) She was isolated and abandoned. Yet she survived. Years of surgeries came after this veterinarian took her into his care. Many still await her.
A spirit of survival and self-preservation are rooted deep within her. Not only physically, but emotionally. She fights, she endures, she doesn't like to show weakness. These walls she has built are high. But slowly, we are breaking them down. Gerril and Eliezer, who don't lose patience with her and play until she is exhausted. Donald, who wraps his arms around her when she cries. Nurses, who took her outside after all the other patients so that she didn't have to stay in the isolation room every day and who adorned her bandage with stickers and bows. Doctors, who are changing her face. Each one reminding her that she is brave, and she is beautiful.
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