Enok remembers being jeered, mocked, chased by packs of children and having people recoil in disgust at his cleft lip. While his memories echo the stories of thousands of Operation Smile patients – most young children – Enok already endured a lifetime of torment when he received surgery at 25 years old.
Suffering from a severe bilateral cleft lip, Enok finally summoned the courage to seek help during an Operation Smile medical mission to Rwanda in 2013. Even then, Enok was reluctant to receive surgery. It was on a visit to his village that Operation Smile volunteers saw him persuaded.
“If they were not here to convince me, I wouldn’t be able to temper going into a bar and sitting with other people and sharing a cup,” Enok said. “But now I can enter into any place and people even come to share the cup with me.”
It’s been three years since Enok’s life was irrevocably changed by Operation Smile. Though his surgical scars are almost invisible to the naked eye, his emotional scars continue to heal as this soft-spoken man recalled the daily struggles he once faced.
“I walk to work from my home and before the surgery, I would take all sorts of detours and creep through people’s gardens and farms so that I could avoid being seen,” Enok explained as he walked through lush green vistas on his way home from the bakery at which he works. “Children would either run away if they saw me or run behind shouting horrible things.”
Enok’s constantly stopping to greet yet another friend or pass along the latest news and gossip with a neighbour. People called his nickname throughout the walk, and when they yelled, “Bibi,” it wasn’t hard to detect notes of affection and pride in the tone.
“Before (the surgery), everyone was scared of me. I couldn’t stand and talk to a girl, but now I can easily find a girl on the roadside and stand for a while and talk to her,” Enok explained as he grinned. “Even young kids would get frightened when they saw me, but nowadays I am a normal person in the community. I meet people and they talk to me like they would someone who has been there the whole time.”
When Enok mentioned being “there the whole time,” he referred to being cruelly ostracized and made to feel as if he didn’t exist before the surgery. At home, his mother hovered in the background, ever-protective of her seventh child and confirmed this misery.
“Whenever I was going somewhere with Enok, young kids would run away because they thought he would bite them,” she said. “I kept hoping and praying that God would help him. When it happened, I praised God for it because it was an answer to my dreams. It was done perfectly and he is really new as he says.”
Since receiving surgery, Enok has enjoyed a more fulfilling experience working at the bakery as well.
“I have regained respect from my community, including my boss and colleagues, because before I was less considered and working in a way isolated from the rest,” Enok explained.
There is a confidence around the baker and, together with his mother, he’s become an advocate for Operation Smile’s work in Rwanda. They’ve even gone so far as to track down a nearby resident and friend, Veronica, who has a cleft lip and encourage her to seek surgery.
“She is afraid for now, but we are trying to convince her,” Enok said. “As for the good things that have happened to me and changed me to a new person, if I meet someone with the same problem, I would advise him or her to go to see the doctor and find out if there is any opportunity for surgery.”
