Beautiful(56)
“A big explosion,” she said to the mother, gesticulating with her arms to show how big it was, and said “Boom!” loudly to go with it. The little girl laughed when she did, and let Dr. Dennis examine her. She watched Véronique with interest the entire time.
The little girl smiled again when they left her, looked at Véronique and said “Boom!” herself and pointed to Véronique, and they all laughed.
“Yes, boom!” Véronique said again, and pointed to her face. Then the child said something to her mother, which Felicity translated again.
“She says you are very pretty,” Felicity said with a smile.
“Thank you!” Véronique answered her. “You are very pretty too,” she said, pointing to the little girl and smiling, as Felicity translated again. The little girl giggled and hid her face in her pillow. They moved on and Véronique was still smiling. The nurses didn’t comment on the exchange or ask further details about the scars on Véronique’s face. “Boom” seemed to cover it.
When they finished the doctor’s rounds, he took Véronique out to the car he drove while he was there. All the doctors used it. “I thought I’d give you a look at the nearby villages.” He spoke the local dialects well enough to converse with the patients easily and occasionally used a translator for difficult cases, so he got all the information he needed accurately. He was deeply committed to the people in the area and the goals of the HALO Trust, to make Angola mine-free in the future. Their name stood for “Hazardous Area Life-support Organization” and he’d known many of the young people in the villages since they were born.
They followed a deeply rutted road and stopped at a village about ten miles away with a lot of mud huts and a few shaky-looking small wooden buildings. Several of the residents recognized him and greeted him warmly, as they walked around. A stream ran alongside the town, where women were washing clothes and carrying vessels of water and baskets on their heads. Most of them wore sandals, many were barefoot. Their poverty was evident, but they were friendly and welcoming to Dick and Véronique. No one looked unfriendly or unhappy. A few were eating, and there were cows nearby.
“The cows belong to the chief,” he said to her, “to show that he’s the richest man in the village.” As they got in the car to leave, a man ran up to them and tried to hand a young goat to Dick. He kept bowing and thanking the doctor in Kikongo, and Dick pointed to the car to show he couldn’t take the goat with him, and the donor accepted it back in good humor.
“We give them free services,” he explained to her, “but that’s not how they like to do things, so they bring us melons, and chickens, an occasional goat or a young pig. They like to pay their debts. They’re honorable people. I always tell Phillip about it, and wonder what would happen if our patients gave us pigs or goats in exchange for Botox shots. That could be interesting.” She laughed, thinking of how luxurious their office was. A pig running around the office would definitely be entertaining.
They visited several other villages that were similar, Chiumbo and Lioema, and then looped back to the hospital on another rutted old road. She had seen numerous injured children during their drive. There were many of them, and she could see why their hospital treated so many patients on an ongoing basis.
“The roads get washed out sometimes during the rainy season. It’s harder to get to them then, and for them to come to us. We have an old truck with four-wheel drive, but it’s not reliable. We need so many things here. We have to prioritize very carefully. The medical equipment and supplies come first.” She could see a need for many kinds of equipment. He said the hospital existed on donations of the material they needed and medical supplies. But whatever they got was never enough. And their available funds were limited.
It was after lunchtime by the time they got back to the hospital, and she went to get something to eat in the kitchen, and then to clean up after the drive over the rough roads. She took off her hiking boots and jeans, which were all dusty. Prudence, one of the English nurses, dropped by to say hello while she was changing, and saw the scars on her legs.
“Was that boom too?” They both smiled, thinking of the little girl with the scars on her face in the ward that morning. Véronique nodded and put on fresh jeans.
“Yes, it was. It was a big boom.”
“Military?” she asked her. She had been an army nurse for five years, before she left the military and came to Africa to Saint Matthew’s, recruited by a doctor she knew who volunteered there.
“Brussels airport a year ago,” Véronique said simply.
“Shit,” Prudence said, making a face. “The world is a crazy place these days. I used to see injuries like that when I was an army nurse and something went wrong on maneuvers.” She had recognized the shrapnel wounds.
“I’m okay now,” Véronique said, and meant it.
“What did you do before that, and before you came to Africa?” she asked, curious about her. She looked familiar.
“I was a model before the boom,” she said with a smile, and Prudence stared at her.
“Oh my God, Véronique Vincent? I saw every magazine you were ever in. You were my idol. I dyed my hair the color of yours once. It looked terrible on me. That really is rotten luck. I wondered why I hadn’t seen you in a year. I thought maybe you had a baby and took a year off.”