Those were Zainab Jafar’s words when doctors at the Shriners Burns Hospital in Galveston asked her during an initial evaluation how she wanted them to proceed with her daughter’s plastic surgery.
“She is a girl,” Jafar told them. “The face is the most important part.”
Even with scarred hands and bright red burn marks on her chin, cheeks, nose, forehead and left leg, Sara Al-Humadi, 3, was beautiful.
But Jafar, a dentist, and her husband, an orthodontist, knew they owed it to their little girl with big black eyes and extra-long eyelashes to seek the most advanced medical treatment for her second- and third-degree burns.
In war-torn Iraq, seasoned plastic surgeons were not available.
Neither was a mask nor silicone gel patches to speed up the healing process — at least not until the family received two shipments, one from neighboring Jordan and another one from Arizona.
For months, the couple desperately sought help to rid Sara’s skin of the reminders of that November day last year when a kerosene stove used to heat water ignited a fire.
“I cried all the time,” Jafar said.
Sitting Friday in the living room of a host family that lives near the pediatric hospital for burn victims, Jafar smiled. She smiled a lot.
Sara’s hour-and-a-half surgery two days earlier went well.
“I’ve got confidence in the medicine here,” Jafar said. “This is a great chance for the girl.”
Her hope is that Sara’s face will be what it was like before the accident, and that once her waist-long hair lost to the flames starts growing, she will be “normal, just normal.”
By July 29, the day Sara turns 4, the swollen post-surgery face and a minor bruise will be gone and the bandages will have long been removed.
If everything else runs smoothly, with time people will probably stop staring at her.
That thought alone makes Jafar happy.
“Sara gets shy when people look at her all the time,” she said.
Jafar is grateful to Americans, God, doctors, nurses and all the people she and Sara have met, from the Lebanese interpreter who accompanies them everywhere, to those who have made arrangements for a stay in Galveston that could last up to six months.
She is also forever indebted to Samaritan Purse, the nonprofit, nondenominational Christian organization contacted by the now dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority.
The North Carolina-based organization coordinated the 17-hour trip from the Middle East to Galveston.
Working in more than 100 countries, the relief group has brought more than 230 children to the United States and Canada for heart surgery and other medical procedures.
“They don’t leave us alone,” Jafar said. “I always feel somebody supports me. That’s very important because I’m in a foreign country.”
But despite the overwhelming support, Jafar prays every day for a family reunion in Hilla, a town about 40 miles from Baghdad.
She misses her husband and sons, Al Mustafha, 11, Yaser, 10, and baby Abdullah, 22 months.
So does Sara. Each night before going to bed, she names her brothers one by one. On the morning of the surgery, while waiting to be put under anesthesia, she played with family pictures and talked about them.
As long as Sara needs medical attention, even if this means leaving her career and her family behind for an extended period of time, Jafar plans to be by her daughter’s side.
“This is not a waste of time,” she said. “When they finish with the face, they will keep going, step by step.”
Unless specifically asked about the marks on her right arm, Jafar doesn’t talk about her own injuries suffered during the blaze.
That’s not to say she won’t schedule a doctor’s appointment in the future.
