Helping one girl face the future with hope

Groggily, Marwa looked into Theresa's eyes. "Mommy.... "

On March 6, Miller operated again.

The flap of skin, twisting down between her eyes, seemed like a snout. In a restaurant one day, a boy had looked at her and fled back to his friends. "Elephant girl!"

Now Miller raised the flap. Underneath was the transplanted cartilage. With needles, scissors, forceps and thread, he chipped at the cartilage and molded it. Like a sculptor, he thinned it here, then thinned it there.

Slowly, he created a tip.

On April 10, he operated a third time. Using scissors and scalpels, he refashioned the flap of skin around the top of what was starting to look like a real nose.

There came a moment of truth.

He lifted the flap and snipped it from its moorings.

In a miraculous way, the flap would find new roots and new ways for blood to flow and keep it alive.

And there it was: Her face was beginning to look as it once had.

After each operation, Marwa moaned. "No, no," she cried. "Get away, get away."

"But little girl, you need water," Saad said.

"They did more than what you told me!" she cried out after one surgery. "There is a lot of pain! I want my father! I need to be with my father! Ohhhh! Why? Why? Why? Why is this happening to me, Allah? Where is my mother? Why did she have to die? Why?

Saad could do nothing. He stroked her arm. "It's OK, baby. It'll be all right, little girl."

"Mr. Saad, why is Allah punishing me? Why did Allah take my mother? I want to be with her. I don't want to live anymore. I wish I had died. I wish the Americans had just killed me."

The anesthetic worked like a truth serum, Saad thought, letting her spill out her true feelings. He stiffened when he heard them.

Marwa wanted to see her face.

A hand mirror lay on a table. Saad hesitated. Then he gave it to her.

Marwa stared. Despite improvements, her nose was still a puffy, reddened clump, oozing blood. Two yellow tubes still protruded from its nostrils.

"This is a nose?" she cried out. "Why didn't God let me die?"

Concerns and clashes

BETWEEN surgeries, Saad spoke to Marwa's father and learned that he was patrolling the roof of his flat every night in fear that someone would hurt his family.

How could Saad, in good conscience, send Marwa home?

On the other hand, so long as she was in America, how could he shield her from temptations? Especially the temptation of the bicycle?