Emmanuel

Emmanuel seems a happy, well-adjusted five-year-old, and that’s a little strange. Strange because Emmanuel was born with a cleft lip in Africa, a land where birth defects are often considered a curse or the work of evil spirits....

Others routinely shun children like Emmanuel, even neighbours and family. That kind of rejection is devastating for anyone, especially a child. Some hide in their homes. Others try to disguise the deformity. Most avoid eye contact and rarely smile.

Not Emmanuel. As he playfully bats a balloon around the Mercy Ship recovery ward two days after corrective surgery, his eyes flash mischief and his laugh is infectious. Emmanuel is aware that he’s different somehow. At the age of three he returned home from nursery class and announced that he wouldn’t be going back to school. The other children were making fun of his broken lip. Now five, Emmanuel still sucks his thumb, no doubt to mask his upper lip.

When Emmanuel’s family heard about Mercy Ships, they feared it was too good to be true. If an ordeal like this hasn’t broken Emmanuel’s spirit, it’s hard to imagine anything that could. So it won’t seem at all strange if, in a few years time, we see his happy smile beaming from a magazine cover, presidential podium or the silver screen.