After a lovely day of sightseeing it is back to work! Monday at Nurture Hospital had 12 surgeries.

One little girl has been here at the hospital since in-take day last Wednesday. Her name is Ayesha and she is striking. She came from her village Bashkali on the bus with her father, Nobi. They found out about this Rotaplast mission from a poster a friend saw in Chittagong. She is the youngest of 6 sisters, and attends school in her village of 250 people. We asked her father about their life in the village; he is a taxi driver who started out as a rickshaw driver. He saved money and bought a taxi. Nobi makes 400 takas daily, but half goes back into gas and repair of his taxi so he takes home the equivalent of $2.50. Making sure his children get educated is all he cares about, he said, when we asked how he feels about having six daughters. He himself can only write his name. “The more they learn, the better I feel,” he said through a translator.

Ayesha

Ayesha before and after. What a transformation.

There is another interesting gentleman we have at Nurture. Rana Mohammad came to our intake with barely a top lip. The doctors decided to perform an abbe flap to make him an upper lip. The procedure involved sewing his bottom lip up over his top lip and keeping it there for a week. After a week, they will cut his mouth open and flip the skin down to make two lovely lips. It is amazing what these surgeons can do in a week. Rana has to stay at the hospital the whole time, and since most of the patients are children and he is 20, he interacts a lot with us using sign language. Our dentist, Aaron, gave him a copy of his Ernest Hemmingway book of short stories because he can read English. He sat with Sherry today in the office, keeping her company and asking everyone to take pictures with him. His operation to split the skin will be on Thursday, so I will share some good after photos then.

Rana
Aaron  with Rana who will have a second operation on Thursday to split his lips.

Today put us officially downhill, we are more than halfway done with surgeries with three days remaining. By the end of this day, there have been 45 successful operations. One of them was my little happy baby Tasmin who went home today after being here for four days; she had her fused fingers separated on Friday.

Tasmin
Tasmin, a little cutie, before she was discharged.

The local Rotary clubs of some of the Rotaplast volunteers have donated some beautiful things for the mission. Sherry Maligaspe, who is from Aurora Rotary club of Kamloops, brought crayons, flashlights and handmade wooden cars to share with patients. Bo Morse, a member of the Rotary Club of Concord, brought 12 prosthetic hands, teddy bears and beanie babies. Ted Alex brought chocolate to share and he is a member of the Rotary Club of Portsmouth.  Brian Walker, our mission director, also contributed to the prosthetic hand donations, he is a member of the Rotary Club of Garberville.