Two weeks far from home, from your family, from your day-to-day activity, from your culture. Two weeks out of your comfort zone. Two weeks forever engraved in my memory.

Such a short lapse of time on the scale of a lifetime, and yet so rich, so intensely human, that it opens up perspectives you might seek throughout your whole life.

What a difficult exercise it is to find the words and phrases to describe such strong emotions. Trying to contribute something, to help through our hands and our practice is a quite exceptional experience, literally, in such a context. The exchanges without a word spoken, receiving the emotions of our little patients, confrontation with the reality of the world outside what we considered to be our garden of Eden, lessons about life from the children, without their necessarily knowing about it… All this is for me the high spot, when the mission took on its full meaning.

Apart from the way I practise osteopathy, it was also my vision of life, of my own life, that changed as I was confronted with this other reality, or rather this other fragment of reality which locked on to and entered my own reality, making way for a new conception which, I hope, will continue to evolve and grow richer thanks to these short moments of my life; so brief in time, and yet so edifying and instructive. 

For all of this I would like to say thank you. Thank you to Docosteocam, thank you to all the team, thank you to Danith, Florent, Stéphanie, Alain, Kévin, Anouck, Isa, Patrick, Annett, Renaud, Amir, Laura, Raymond, Manon, and all the actors in this play. Thank you to the different centres for welcoming us, and especially thank you to the patients for putting their trust in us. Thank you.

Cassiel