Say “Sekerera,” Joshua!

This February, Smile Train’s Senior Manager, Communications, Derek Kwait, traveled to Zambia to collect stories of our patients and partners alongside Sibusisiwe Yona, our Harare-based Program Director for Southern Africa, and a freelance photographer. He returned particularly eager to share this story with you, one he feels truly illuminates the transformations — small and large, expected and unexpected — your support for Smile Train makes possible around the world each day.

It was another cloudless day so hot that you could feel the midsummer sun draining moisture from your skin with every step.

Like most patients we met on that trip, Joshua lived in a small compound of hand-built cinderblock rooms just outside downtown Lusaka. We arrived around lunchtime, and as we walked down the rocky, cluttered path between the makeshift houses, the first thing I noticed was all the children, some playing a game with pebbles, others sitting around a large pot eating cooked vegetables with plastic spoons. Most noticed we were there, but few seemed to care enough to leave the shade.

We turned a corner, and there was Josephine, welcoming us to her home with a warm smile and her sons at her knees — Favour, age five, and the man of the hour, three-year-old Joshua.

She motioned for us to make ourselves comfortable on her couch, but comfort was hard to come by. It was even hotter inside. I think I must be soft, but when even Yona commented on the heat, I knew it must be hot. Josephine helped us pull out an oscillating fan, but she is a soft-spoken woman, and the thock-thock it made in the small room, like a baseball hitting a bat every half-second, would make the interview impossible. We took a gulp from our water bottles and turned it off.

Then Josephine started to speak and all else fell away, including the heat.

Joshua’s Story

We were sitting in the room where Joshua was born and where Josephine had seen a cleft for the first time.

“I cried because of it. It was my first time seeing such a thing,” she recalled, tenderly placing a hand on Joshua as the heat lulled him to sleep in her lap.

No one in the family had seen a cleft before.

She and her husband, Lumbwe (who was at work when we visited), feared Joshua would live his whole life like that, but any thoughts of the baby’s future felt like a luxury while he was screaming with hunger night and day. He would only drink from Josephine’s left breast, and even then, the milk got caught in his cleft and dripped down his throat, choking him.

Meanwhile, rumors about spells and family curses circulated in the village and unwanted questions stalked Josephine through the marketplace.

It got so bad that she only left home when necessary.

Thankfully, when Joshua was four months old, she and Lumbwe met doctors who pointed them to Beit CURE Hospital, their local Smile Train partner. When they learned Joshua could receive the cleft surgery he needed for free there thanks to Smile Train’s donors, “We were so happy, as it was a fantastic opportunity for my son,” she said. “Otherwise, it would have been nearly impossible for us.”

Still, Josephine couldn’t help but be nervous on the day of her baby’s surgery. Reading the anxiety on her face, the staff took time to explain every detail of what was to come and assure her it would all go smoothly. They remained by her side the whole time Joshua was under the knife.

But nothing could have prepared her for the moment they rolled him out of the operating room. “I cried with joy and happiness,” she remembered, her face positively glowing. “I didn’t expect the surgery to go so well. My husband was so happy, too.”

The neighbors who had hounded her with accusations of magic and omens were now themselves spellbound by Joshua’s new smile.

Yet, that surgery could not be the end of Joshua’s cleft journey. He still needed follow-up appointments and other care, and for the last seven-and-a-half years, Josephine has seen to it that he’s there and on time for all of them. “I haven’t missed a visit to the hospital because I don’t want my son to realize one day that he has missed out on these opportunities.”

Summoning the Doctor

When we asked about Joshua’s future, Josephine smiled wide. She sees a good life ahead for him. She wants him to be a doctor like the people who helped him, and says he wants to be one, too.

Can we ask him ourselves? Josephine nudged Joshua awake. He did not want that. Now he was groggy and a little cranky, just when we had to start his photo shoot.

But we weren’t worried. We are experts at getting our patients to smile.

Stealing the Spotlight

We led Joshua and Josephine out to the courtyard connecting their compound to the road, where I gave him some swag, including a Smile Train soccer ball. That woke him up. His eyes grew wide as the ball itself, and once I handed it to him, he hugged it to his chest like he had no intention of ever letting it go… until Favour wanted to play.

They started kicking it around the dusty lot while we snapped pictures. In a moment, the other neighborhood children were there, too, crowding around, watching, cheering, wanting a pass.

Eventually, we had to pull Joshua aside so we could begin the more formal photoshoot. Curious, the kids gathered into a giggly gaggle just behind us.

I had never seen that happen before. It was a special sight.

“Say sekerera, Joshua!” our photographer said, using a regional word for “smile.” “Say sekerera, Joshua!”

“Say sekerera, Joshua!” a chorus of children’s voices laughed from behind us. Now Joshua was smiling! And we were, too.

Then, while we took more pictures of Joshua and his family, something truly astonishing happened that took all of us by surprise — the kids formed an impromptu choir. First, they sang songs they knew.

Then one they made up on the spot:

“Say sekerera, Joshua! Say sekerea, Joshua!”

Clearly, this group was ready for their moment in the spotlight, too, so we turned the camera on them.

An Extraordinary Blessing

We were all having so much fun together in that courtyard that we forgot how hot it was. I felt like I could have stayed out there playing with them forever, and it seemed our new friends felt the same way. When we eventually, reluctantly, did pile back into the car, they crowded around it, laughing and singing their new favorite song.

“Say sekerera, Joshua! Say sekerera, Joshua!”

Half a year later, reflecting on this experience still makes me smile, but I think it also speaks to something deeper about the ripple effect every donation to Smile Train sets into motion.

Joshua told us earlier that he was never bullied and that his friends don’t know he ever had a cleft; even Favour said he doesn’t recognize pictures of his brother from before his surgery. The neighborhood children were laughing with Joshua the way children anywhere would laugh if random foreigners showed up on their block and suddenly, inexplicably, started treating one of their friends like a celebrity.

So, while Joshua’s friends know nothing of the stigma he and his mother faced in his earliest months, if they ever encounter a person with an untreated cleft, they will know that it is not a curse at all, but rather the source of a blessing so extraordinary that it has the power to bring people together in joy from all corners of the earth:

A child’s smile.