Dressed in a white lab coat, stethoscope in her ears, “Dr Suelen” auscultates her “patient”, a black doll with a small damaged celluloid body, whom she treats in her house on the hillside, near Rio de Janeiro.
Suelen da Silva doesn’t have a medical degree, but the 62-year-old Brazilian has plenty of ingenuity: she turned her hobby into a livelihood, after losing her job as a housekeeper in early April. of the coronavirus pandemic.
Small in stature, but with a strong personality, this black woman with thick-rimmed glasses has created a small “real life” hospital for dolls at her home in a poor neighborhood of Niteroi, across from Rio Bay.
While health professionals are seen as real heroes in the fight against Covid-19, “Doctor Suelen” makes play the imagination of children who entrust their “patients” to him.
She regularly sends them photos on Whatsapp of their dolls, lying in a white miniature bed topped with multicolored lamps, with a clearly visible medical follow-up sheet.
“I keep them updated day after day. The children behave like parents whose baby is hospitalized. One day a five-year-old girl left me her doll, crying and saying, ‘Don’t make her suffer too much. , don’t give him too many injections! “, she says.
Pérola, the ragged black doll with completely disjointed legs, was even put on a drip, with a thin plastic tube attached to her wrist with adhesive tape.
– Secret formula –
The vocation for doll medicine was born in Suelen during the childhood of her daughters, 35 and 22 years old today.
“I raised them alone and I never had the money to buy them dolls. So I started to retype the ones I found in the trash,” says Suelen, who for years also donated toys repaired by him for social projects.
“But when I lost my job, it became a profession,” she explains.
“To help promote myself, my eldest daughter Lydiane started posting pictures of my work on Facebook. When she told me there had been over 3,000 views, it scared me a bit,” says “Dr Suelen”.
Thanks to this work, she manages to make ends meet, even though her income is “very variable”.
Hospital costs range from five reais (80 euro cents) for mild symptoms – so simple repairs – to 70 reais (11 euros) for patients in a more critical condition.
“In a good week, I am entrusted with about twenty”, she reveals, for a hospital stay of three to four days on average.
The dolls, which often arrive disjointed, bald, even beheaded after various accidents in life, are repaired, pampered, washed and sometimes even dressed with hand-sewn clothes of his creation.
Suelen even invented a secret formula, mixing several types of solvents and cleaning products, to remove pen marks often considered indelible.
In a bucket, we can see several dolls taking a good bath to remove these unwanted “tattoos”.
– Clinic under construction –
But like many Brazilian hospitals with precarious infrastructure, his special clinic is at the mercy of inclement weather.
Because of the torrential rains of the hurdy-gurdy, she had to move her infirmary from her upstairs terrace, totally flooded, to install it in a cramped space, against the kitchen of her little house in red cinder blocks.
But she dreams of being able to inaugurate soon her “real” clinic, under construction on the land next door, which will be larger.
For the moment, there is just a concrete slab of about fifteen m2 and a pile of red bricks. Suelen, she already sees a small room with a bay window to admire the breathtaking view of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio.
“I pray to God that he will help me heal enough dolls to be able to complete this construction,” she says, her eyes full of hope.
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