Leonard and I are jointly writing this blog update about Tane, who came through his surgery yesterday---28 November ---with flying colors. 
The day before we had had a pre-op appointment with Dr Griffith and his team, which includes two female, one male, Australian surgeons, and two local surgeons. We sat with them briefly in a small room, Tane in my lap, frigid with fear, Annette even more frozen by the door. 
From a small village on a tributary of a tributary of the Sepik River, to the consultation room of Modilon Hospital filled with Australians, is a long and ambitious leap, to be sure, and Annette and Tane both are still alittle winded by it. In classic Yimas form, Annette has said little more this past week of waiting in Madang than to chronicle the stages of her journey in meticulous detail: first we got on the plane in Karawari with the pilot George, then we landed in Hagen, this was Saturday, then Joe Maspela and his family got us and we went to town for food… (this is in Pidgin). Because the doctors asked that Tane be admitted right away, checked for anaemia (all Papua New Guineans have anaemia, its really a question of degree) and given a bed in ward 3, we mobilized our ‘mob’ and had them settled into the ward by early evening. We have a small crew of Karawari relatives who have been living at the staff house, 
and they have been present and accounted for in all stages of this, holding the squirming Tane, sitting bedside, and spending hours at the market and in our kitchen making food for Mum and Tane, and running all kinds of errands. Having someone in hospital in PNG is a real production. There are nurses, and roughly 30 beds in each ward, but food, toilet, sheets, pillows, water, every aspect of a patient’s comfort, including, to some degree, his/her meds, is a family’s responsibility, and so you pretty much move in as a temporary outpost of your own village. Relatives stay in shifts, and lurk around the grass between the open ward walkways, or in Madang’s case, on the pavement right outside the ward door. Privacy is not a priority for the sick in PNG. And people attend to you matter of factly, without hesitation. This is the thing that never stops impressing me about PNG: people just do it, they see a need and answer it, like soldiers falling into line or the rare Samaritan who says ‘you dropped this’ in the western world. Hospitals are filled with relatives. 
Every needle jab is a drama surrounded by family and strangers at the bedside, and the whole ward looks up when they hear the creaking wheels of a gurney coming through the door. Of course the door is open, too, so that mothers with babies at the breast, mean with heads cracked open, kids with their legs suspended, and all manner of gauze and tears and puss, can be observed by anyone passing by. Curtains? Those are reserved for the Intermediate ward, aka the expat ward. Crowds gather and disperse. Children wail, we all waft toward the bed and float back after meds have been dispensed. 
The problem right now, for Tane, is that they only have Panadol, ibuprofen, to give him, and once every four hours. One shot every four hours for a child who has just had both feet taken apart and rewired. I stop one of the Australian doctors, a friendly young woman, between surgeries on one of the open walkways and she tells me this team of Australian volunteers has treated three double cub foot patients in Wewak earlier this week, and will have one more tomorrow. Tane will have ten days of misery, she says, and then a couple of months of recovery. She wore stylishly tartan blue scrubs, plastic eyeglasses headbanding her straight dark hair, and light blue crocs on her feet, as she explained the surgery, the post-op and the difference between panadol and aspirin for a post-op swollen limb. 
Our guardian angel, or one of them. Actually I tried to thank every member of the crew during the afternoon and early evening, knowing full well that most of the infinitely grateful parents and spouses were too shy, too constrained or preoccupied to do so. My whitemissusness made Tane first in line for the surgery, but when we arrived in the morning, he’d been backlisted, so he only got into the operating theatre atnoon. Junior, Jason and three other relatives went to the market to buy heaps of good garden food and cook for Tane and Annette, so we all returned with bottles of cold water and a big
pan of kai in the afternoon, to find Annette holding Tane like a broken doll, and walking the cement paths as he cried. Poor little one with two plastered legs in obvious misery. By coincidence there is a 2 year old named Robert, fromKarkarIsland, assigned to the bed next to him who had the same surgeries for the same double club footedness. Before the surgeries, we brought both boys toy jeeps, but now it looks like it’ll be weeks before they crawl the floor with them again. Today (day 2) we found a way to sit Tane without pain, and he preoccupied himself by taking apart a small radio. Machines are his favourite things. 
Whereas baby Pauly, same age, is focused on balls and balloons. The two female doctors stopped by and checked him again today, pleased that he was smiling now, while Robert was still crying uninterruptedly in the next bed, and a third clubfoot patient had just been brought in from surgery, still asleep, across the room. We just now realize how lucky Tane is because he’ll be recovering at the house in the settlements right next door to the house of his post-op doctor, aSepiksurgeon. Too great. 
He’s been three nights in the hospital, the last two in pain, and yet when we came to pick him up and release him, he was calm and composed, sitting on the floor eating Twisties (as breakfast) with his Mum. 
Last night he didn’t squirm or cry at all, they tell us. But poor Robert is still crying, apparently because one cast is too tight, so the doctors had to change it this morning. The little girl Stephanie, from Bogia, is the third member of the ex club foot club, aka plaster cast kids (Cherry Vanilla lives on) and is even younger than Robert. 
She's sitting up in one of these shots.
Three double club footers have had surgery in Madang, we learned, and two in Wewak. I have to say Tane has been heroically brave and drinking his meds unflinchingly, every 4 hours. A regular Miss Puerto Rico with pepper-rash and an ice pack. 
As I entered the haus sik this morning I glimpsed the young man I had seen in the clinic line on Tuesday, the one whose legs are so bowed they make him walk like a chimp. 
But today he was hauling duffel bags and bedding with what I took to be his mother, setting off again, after what must have been a disappointing consultation with the Australians. 
As a giant fist clenched my heart to see him I realized how lucky these three little kids have been to have these surgeons here in Madang at just the right time in their lives.
How lucky Tane has been to have Zach Simonsen, Susan Salinger, Vivian Rieger and others whose names Tane may never know but who contributed dollars to the hat Zach passed for his travel, surgery and recovery. 
Today we said our goodbyes to the two other members of the ex- club foot club and brought Tane back to the house for a more comfortable recovery. Annette smiled for the first time in days. 
The very last shot here is Tane giving the thumbs up after getting settled in with his radio and pillows back at the house. 
