A Smile is the Same in Every Language

Guest post by Katie Hyde
Photographs by Rachel Fenimore

Though as a high school journalist, my job is to convey the sounds, sights, and smells of a moment to the reader, I have found it very difficult to tell my Mali story.

Every time I begin to put pen to paper, I freeze up. So I suppose I will begin with a smile.

I smiled so much in Mali my cheeks ached every night when I crawled under my mosquito net and fell asleep, exhausted.

I smiled for Abby’s billions of photos and Ben’s videos, for the hand washing team’s dance parties and our Dagabo girls-only nail polish party. I smiled for street soccer players and waiting patients and exhausted surgeons.

I smiled when other volunteers and I finished sorting over 50,000 pills on our first day in Ouelessebougou. I smiled when the children of Daganbougou sang the Mali national anthem for us at the top of their lungs. I smiled when Shaka, Boi’s little brother, fell asleep in my arms and everyone nicknamed me “the baby whisperer.”

In her daily notes of inspiration, anesthesiologist Lisa Heath wrote “a smile is the same in every language.” And of all the thousands of lessons I took home with me, that is the one that sticks out.  

My first day assisting intake was controlled chaos. I walked patients along the dusty, gravelly path from intake to another line where they waited to be seen by a physician or nurse. It was on these 30 second walks that I first learned to communicate primarily in smiles. It was mostly out of necessity, especially when a patient would begin conversing to me in Bambara, at which point I said, “Ne tε bamanankan me” (I don’t speak Bambara) and cracked a huge, awkward grin.

I smiled when the Jessica, Rachel, Katie and I stepped out of Yaya’s truck onto the scorched red dust of Daganbougou, and in the distance we could see kids streaming out of the school, sprinting across the field, shouting and leaping in the air. When they arrived, panting, at the car, we all just stood there, staring at each other, not knowing what to say.

So we smiled.

Most of my interactions in Mali were that way, whether I was helping out at the clinic or walking through the market in Bamako or trying to sleep on a concrete floor with just a sheet or sitting down for a meal of rice and peanut butter gravy. 

When I think back to Mali, I think of the feel of dust between my toes and coating every inch of my body. I hear the hollering of “BE!” (goal!) during a soccer game with students in Daganbougou. I smell the perfumed soap from the Laico Hotel in Bamako. Over time, those sights, smells, and sounds will probably fade.

But the smiles will always stay with me.

Katie Hyde is a high school senior, participant of the recent MMF Mali mission and Editor-in-Chief of her high school newspaper, Dart.  

Rachel Fenimore is also a high school senior and participant of the recent MMF Mali mission.

Comments

[General Practice Perth]

Really fulfilling and heart warming.