Every Interplast Italy mission has colors, sounds, scents, images, and stories that are the same yet all different. The colors are those of the countries where the association goes to donate its work, and they are usually very colorful places, yellow, red, and purple. They are the colors of people's clothes, the flags flying in the air, and the colors of the sky. There are many sounds: the noise of the crates at the airport, crates containing scalpels, bandages, sutures, medicines, anesthetics, antibiotics, and then toys and clothes. They are the local sounds, the cries from the mountains, the screeching of hospital doors and the quiet thanks of patients' relatives, the laughter of relief, the squeaking of transport vehicles. The scents are the flowers in the meadows, the smell of goats in the patients' clothes, the aroma of spit-roasted chicken and coffee between operations, the smell of the cold early in the morning and late in the evening when it bites. And then there are the eyes, the eyes of the patients and their relatives. Sweet, wide-open eyes, tears, laughter, limping walks, imploring hands and looks. Patients should all be the same, but they are not. You fall in love with someone and inevitably caress them a little more. And they, too, the patients, choose whose arms to seek refuge in. [...] In this expedition immortalized by Carlo Orsi's photos, I believe that one child was “the child” of the mission for everyone. Gluck was walking in the mountains with his father when a yak targeted him and pierced his cheek from one side to the other with its horn. Blood, exposed nerve endings, torn skin, a black hole. Someone told them about the medical team, and the child was carried to the hospital. The gash was enormous, and it took a long time to operate on him, but in the end, they managed to save him [...]. Carlo Orsi went with him, following his journey home through the herds of yaks, surely including the one that had gored him, and saw the joy of his family and friends and their simple, humble way of life. And so, every morning, when the alarm clock rings at six and it's cold and you don't feel like getting up, and you wash in a cold, dirty bathroom, and then you dress in layers and rush to breakfast to perk yourself up, and then you drag your feet to the hospital and have to push your way through the crowd of people who are looking for you and begging you, and then, one after another, the sandwiches and coffee, the cuddles, the medicines, mouths that cannot feed themselves, and there are so many that you wish you never had to go to bed, and then evening comes and you collapse into bed, exhausted but calm in the thought of how many lives you have changed, and you are left with the weight of how many you know you will still leave hanging in the balance.