It was October 26, my third wedding anniversary, and Nick and I had arranged to be nearly four thousand miles apart. He was in Sweden, working with producers on his album. I was in Africa. It didn’t matter, really. We were barely speaking.
We got there in the morning, and I had the day to myself before we took a bus west to Nakura that night. I thought I would sleep, but I wanted to see if I could be anonymous so far away from America. I washed my face and threw on jeans and an oversize army-green jacket. I stood in the mirror, wondering if another tourist would notice I was Jessica Simpson. I decided to pull my hair back with a black bandana, the same way I had on mission trips as a kid. As I did so, I saw the shine of my wedding ring in the mirror. I looked at it, and it felt suffocating and heavy on my hand. I watched myself as I slipped it off to place it in the tiny pocket of my jeans and exhaled. The ring left a line of white on my finger, and I rubbed at it, trying to make it disappear.
I went to Nairobi National Park, a forty-five-square-mile nature preserve just outside the main part of the city. I walked in through the main entrance, and I had the feeling of being on a space walk as I got farther and farther from the safety of the car. I felt untethered, afraid that if someone spotted me, a crowd would form, and then I would have to run. I opened my backpack to get out a bottle of water and sipped nervously as I moved into the park.
“Excuse me,” said a woman behind me. The voice was British.
Please, I thought.
“Excuse me,” she said again. I turned to see an older woman with a husband who matched her to a tee.
She smiled. “Your bag,” she said. “It’s open.”
A wave of relief washed over me. “Thank you,” I said. They kept walking, and so did I, blissfully invisible. Near the entrance, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust runs a sanctuary for orphaned baby elephants and rhinoceroses. As I blended in with a small crowd of people standing behind a light rope line, keepers led a dozen or so baby elephants to a mud bath. The parents of these animals are usually killed by ivory and rhino horn poachers, and the orphans are found close to death themselves. They grow up there, bottle-fed until they are old enough to be released.
“In the beginning, they follow us around,” the keeper told us. “But then they start to make their own decisions about where they want to go, and so we follow them.” Usually, around two years old, the elephants have the confidence to go back into the wild.
I watched them frolic, dropping themselves on the ground and rubbing up against each other, their huge ears flapping. I took my sunglasses off so I could look them in the eyes. People slowly left the viewing area, but I stayed, transfixed. It had been so long since I had spent that amount of time alone among people. This was my sanctuary, too.
I heard the click of a camera’s shutter like a gun cocking. It was to my left, but I didn’t want to turn my face to see it. I shoved my left hand in my pocket and tried to fiddle my wedding ring onto my finger, like Houdini with a hidden key.
Come on, Jess, I said to myself. I scrunched my finger up to catch the ring with my nail.
Another click. Got it. I pulled out my hand and put my sunglasses back on with my left hand to be sure my ring was in the shots. I turned just slightly to see a heavyset white man training a Canon camera on me. I was the game, and I was caught.
I deadened my face, put my sunglasses on, and left the park.
That night, on the bus to Nakura, I wrote in my journal and asked God to replenish my heart so I could be of use to the children coming in for screenings and surgeries the next day. I was so tired of focusing on my own sadness and anxiety.
“I release this pain to You, so You will free me,” I wrote. “Lord, use me as I deny myself anything having to do with ‘me.’ That ‘me’ is denied, passed on, set aside.”
I meant every word, and I thought the same when I walked into the hospital the next morning. “Use me,” I said again to God. There were so many children, and the surgeons would perform over 150 procedures on this mission trip. I stood around and posed for photographs, knowing my job was to bring attention to the charity. The real work was done by people like Dr. Bill Magee, the pediatric plastic surgeon who cofounded the organization.
And then I met Boke. She was eighteen months old, gorgeously chubby, and had come in to have surgery on her cleft lip and palate. Her mother had terrible anxiety about the procedure and had gone outside to calm down. I later learned they had traveled twelve hours to get to the hospital. She must have been overwhelmed to work so hard to get somewhere, only to then face the fear of her baby being operated on by strangers.
Boke began to cry, and I lifted my arms to a nurse out of some instinct I didn’t know I had. The nurse sat her in my lap, and I smiled at her, making soothing shh sounds as I rocked my body to be one big cradle for her. She looked up, and we regarded each other for a moment, two strangers brought together in a place unfamiliar to both of us.
“Look at you,” I said. “You’re so pretty.” She had the tiniest bit of short, tight curls, and as she relaxed, I couldn’t help but kiss her pretty head. Her cleft lip was on the right side of her face, and the wide split went up to her nose, exposing her front teeth.
We relaxed together, and people moved on from watching us. Everyone was so busy that day that Boke and I just blended in until it was her turn. I went to give her over, and she started crying again. Dr. Magee was doing the operation himself and asked if I wanted to scrub in so I could stay with her. I nodded yes, and after I was scrubbed up and capped and gowned, I carried Boke in myself.
“You’re already so beautiful,” I whispered to her. “This will just make things easier for you.” I held Boke when they gave her anesthesia and stroked her head as she slipped off to sleep. I thought I’d leave, but Dr. Magee invited me to stay. I watched, wanting to be a witness to this miracle. It took what, forty-five minutes? And it would change Boke’s life forever. And mine, too. I had come to Kenya thinking I would be blessing these kids with good works, and I was the one being blessed. When it was over, Dr. Magee said he was impressed I didn’t flinch once. It was one of the best reviews I’ve ever received.
I went with Boke to recovery so that I would be the first person she saw when she woke up. I sat cradling her and marveling that you could already see the transformation of her mouth being made whole. I held her in the crook of my right arm, and in her postoperation sleep, she wrapped her little hand around my left index finger.
When she was fully awake, someone went to get her mom to tell her that the surgery was a success. She came in, and we smiled at each other. She had no idea who I was and wanted nothing from me but to step in when she was in need. I hugged her, thinking how scared she must have been.
The doctors worked all day, so I stayed late and did the same the next day. When it was over, Ken and I were exhausted, and I could not stop thanking him for getting me involved in Operation Smile. It gave me perspective on what mattered. I hadn’t planned on doing so much soul searching, but being so far away gave me an opportunity to look inward in stillness.
As part of the trip, we arranged to take a Jeep out to the Masai Mara National Reserve to camp. As we drove farther and farther into the flat grassland, I looked out at the trees dotting the landscape here and there and felt a growing freedom. I could have been anybody to Boke’s mom. Could I be anybody to me? And who did I want to be?